There is a huge difference between rebuilding greens accepted as great and building new ones for a project. HUGE!
In rebuilding great greens, you are copying, or trying to do so as precisely as possible. With new greens, it is an artistic venture. It is like comparing apples and elephants.
As for new, fresh work... and the original question... "How about can they be built "strictly according to plan"? The key word is... strictly.
Of a thousand tries you might get a couple... might, but you will never, ever get a set, and I doubt even a small collection.
Greatness is achieved like in any other artistic pursuit... by delving through initial concepts, picking one that you think will work exceptionally well and refining, refining, refining using the greatest super computer in the world... the human brain. I venture most cannot be built without the architect on-site either... anyone who has worked with builders knows most of the guys on the machines aren't schooled in great golf and have pet styles/habits. There is politics involved too, for a shaper who ditches the architect's concept runs the risk of pissing off the architect by making him look bad, so the shaper will act like a grade school student and color inside the lines. Following plans strictly is safe for the builder (it doesn't cost the construction company anything and they are business to get the job done and get out of there). In fact, a shaper for a company will try to get the boring green build to perfection so the architect who makes his rare site-visit is loath to change anything... just ask the guys who do it for a living. If the architect doesn't care about protecting the investor by being on-site, why should the builder sweat the design details? It's not their job, their responsibility.
Here comes a paradox...
The problem with the human brain, what I just called the supercomputer is it isn't that creative. Is not creative. We run our brain in patterns. For example, with 11 pieces of clothes there are some 3 million ways to get dressed in the morning. We have developed a pattern so we can get to the kitchen for the morning coffee without wearing a sock on our head, underwear as a t-shirt and our pants on with the zipper dragging on the ground. Golf architects who plan-and-run have it hundreds of times more difficult, as do their investors. The architects are responsible for multi-million dollar or Euro investments and the entire success of the project rides on this, therefore with the plan-and-run methodology, they tend to play it safe both by design and then add the uncreative brain and you can fill in the blanks... B _ _ _ _ _ G.
In the field pushing dirt around there are sparks flying all the time; those sparks are opportunities to break out of patterns and safety and get close to the cutting edge (if you want to for that particular green... or any aspect of the design), and this allows you to weigh the other greens and holes and create something that isn't repetitive. It provides opportunities you could never foresee at the drawing board, for if the architect could foresee them he would have planned them... in detail. Which brings me to another point. THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS DETAILED PLANS.
How uncreative are humans? Mike Nuzzo probably knows this study, and perhaps he was run through this test, but NASA developed a test for creativity for its engineers, etc. One involved how many uses one could find for a paper clip. They ran this test on 1800 or so children of kindergarten age, then when they were in grade school and then junior high. If you came up with 200 uses/ideas you were a genius. The result?
Test results amongst 5 year olds: 98% found 200+ ideas/uses!
Test results amongst 10 year olds: 30%
Test results amongst 15 year olds: 12%
Same test given to 280,000 adults: 2%
One would think the opposite would occur. We are schooled out of creativity. The mind gets narrower.
Think of the adult/architect who works in a hit-and-run manner... he is conditioned to think inside a small box. Look at the courses built in the last 30-years (and even longer), with all the advantages of technology, and how sterile and lifeless most of it is. For the same money and I venture for far less money, with more leadership during construction, and with less formal planning, there would be more excellent golf courses. And what do the golf architect associations sell? The school of uncreativity.
This isn't to say planning isn't necessary, to say otherwise would be idiotic, you need it for permits, general routing, nail down some engineering solutions, enviro boundaries, and calculate labor and materials. But selling plans as some form a security blanket or Holy Grail is false. Just look around at the banal courses that have resulted from it with limited leadership or in absence of leadership.
Einstein had a couple quotes that hit this right in the bullseye:
1. Imagination (opportunity seeking) is more important than knowledge (plans).
2. It's not that I'm so brilliant, it's that I stick with problems longer. (As a golf architect, he would be on-site rolling it all around in his well developed brain, seeking opportunities that pop-up as dirt is moving around, listening to the crew for sparks of ideas, looking at Nature, and looking for things he missed during the planning stages.)
Plans should come with warnings, and some in the know do just this.