Did he consiously seek a new style to distinguish himself from the pack?
I think if you ask Tom that very question he will in fact say that he made a very deliberate decision to not design courses that looked like Dye, but to in fact go in another direction so that he would distinguish himself. If Tom made courses that looked like Dye he would not have gotten any work (why hire the copy if you can hire the real thing?). He instead chose to go down another path and thus became a trail blazer. It is very similar to how Dye saw the style of Trent Jones and made a concious decision to go in another direction.
Trust me, give it enough time and a designer will emerge that will distinguish himself from the current style and shift the entire direction of golf design into a new era. Mind you, to be fair, that might be more difficult since there are less and less courses being built.
It really would be better if you guys just asked me the question, instead of speculating about my answer.
Matt, I had only been working at Long Cove about a month when Mr. Dye told me the story of building Harbour Town and when he made the decision to do his own thing instead of following Trent Jones. [Honestly, I think he over-simplified a bit, because he had built Crooked Stick and The Golf Club prior to Harbour Town, but maybe that means he was trying to teach me a lesson instead of just reminiscing.] Anyway, the main reason you know that story is because I have repeated it, I don't know that Pete ever told it to any golf writers.
I never for a minute took his story to mean that he'd made that decision as a business decision. I took it to mean that he thought it was a shame that everybody was building the same stuff and that golf deserved better than that, so he ought to try something different. He had obviously seen enough great courses here and overseas to realize that not all of them were in the Trent Jones style. I also took his story to mean that copying Pete's style was the wrong thing for me to do, and that I ought to find my own voice.
So, that's what I did. I've nodded in the past to the idea that I didn't want to copy Pete's style because it didn't make any sense; I figured I would be competing against not only Pete but also P.B. and Perry, and if you wanted their style you weren't going to hire me anyway. But it was still more than a business decision ... it was a realization that I liked the Golden Age styles better. Even before I started at Long Cove, I'd spent a summer getting around to Merion and Pine Valley and SFGC and Riviera and all those great courses, and wondered why nobody built anything like them anymore. And I'd spent a little time talking to Ben Crenshaw, who wondered the same thing.
Also, being a child of the nuclear age, I was more likely to appreciate that even though we now had the power to destroy the earth, it would be better for the world if we never had to use that power.
What my little conversation with Mr. Dye did for me was free me of the notion that I had to copy his style to show my appreciation to him. I don't know if he had the same conversation with some of the other guys who worked for him, or whether they just didn't take it the same way I did.