Noel,
I want to e-mail you next week sometime on a topic related to this. I see what you are saying, but I think Dunn might be getting a little bit of disrespect here due to his "reputation". In looking through the Hutchinson book, British Golf Links, I see several courses that Dunn did in the 1890s, toward the end of his career, that seem to be much more, shall I say, evolved than the work he is generally associated with. Courses like Scarborough (Ganton) seemed to be in his repetoire during this period, where years earlier they were not. But I haven't been there and I don't know how much those original nine holes were changed since Dunn even went to Deal. Perhaps Hunter changed everything that Dunn did over time and that is the course that fundamentally exists today.
It's funny that Hutchinson was such a fan of so many of Dunn's courses that he included them in his 1897 book, but people that came along twenty or thirty years later were so opposed to his courses. It makes me wonder about what Hutchinson was really thinking at the time. Were his beliefs in 1897 so different than people like Mackenzie and Simpon. Or did his thoughts shift over the years? Or did they suddenly shift in 1897 when he started at Country Life and it became more lucrative for him to espouse a much more Arts & Crafts tone in his work? The reason that I ask is that some of his writings before 1897 are somewhat in line with the design beliefs of Dunn and Morris, but after that they seem to shift. If Hutchinson was the founder of the Arts & Craft movement in golf course architecture like Tom MacWood writes then I wonder how he made this move so suddenly to a new set of ideas.
I don't want to rehash the whole A&C/Victorian argument, just thinking out loud.