Tom Doak,
You, more than most on this site, are familiar with how different clubs are governed, and how the mood of the membership, as communicated by the Board can vary.
Pine Tree has an interesting form of governance that has it's pluses and it's minuses.
Every two years there's a new President and new Officers and new Committee Chairman.
It's hard to establish continuity under that system.
Just when a Chairman is getting up to speed, he's an ex-chairman.
On the other hand, it thwarts the acquisition of a long term power base and as such can prevent change.
Since you have this revolving door system, it can disrupt continuity.
And one of the ways that manifests itself is by having a group in power that has no connection to the group in power 6 or 8 years previous.
This in turn promotes a rediscovering of the wheel, with the current Board, who strikes out on their own to modify the golf course based on their ideas, ideas which can be in a vacuum, rather than connected to the ideas from 6 to 8 years ago.
Hence every 6 to 8 years you have "new" concepts and ideas about how the golf course should look and play.
Some of Pine Tree's issues have been deeper than perceived.
Some clubs in Florida have good sub-soil and others don't.
The general geological line of demarcation was the Florida Turnpike.
Generally, Courses West of the FT like Boca Rio and Adios had very poor sub-soil and were barely above the water table.
All too often clubs thought they had "bad" grass, so they decided to regrass, and they felt, as long as they were going to regrass, they might as well do __________. So architectural projects were borne out of regrassing projects.
And, since the problem wasn't necessarily confined to the grass, but the sub-soil, after a few years clubs figured that they had another grass problem, again, and the cycle repeated itself. And, because an architect was associated with the failed regrassing, they would bring in a different architect at the next go-round. And still the underlying problem, the poor sub-soil issue remained unresolved.
Each club has it's own culture and form of governance and those factors often dictate architectural and agronomic outcomes.
Hope that helps.