No, I meant what I said. Tom will be on the short list of great architects in any decent history of the discipline, as others have noted above. That is not because he invented the term 'minimalism' (I think Whitten did (?)), but because he was a leader in making it a credible approach to gca. And that's a pretty big deal.
First, as you note, the term has become very popular. It has also been bastardized, but that is hardly Tom's fault. It has come to mean a course with a certain 'look' and sold as such. I don't think that is what Tom is getting at all.
I think what Tom is getting at (he can correct me if I am missing the mark) has to do with learning a particular kind of lesson from classic courses like TOC or NB or Prairie Dunes or Myopia that others seemed to have missed.
Specifically, the lesson to be taken from those sorts of courses has less to do with their look than with the quality of the golf they engender. They were built with limited budgets, primitive construction equipment, bad irrigation and drainage options. Which left them with crazy micro contours, humps and bumps, native (sometimes nasty) vegetation, ragged hazards and so forth. But those features are part of why we like playing those courses so much. They help make the golf more fun, challenging and less predictable than usual.
So Tom's originality, I think, is not so much in inventing a new sort of golf architecture but rather in his insights into one of the ways the great classical courses from the Golden Age and earlier work so well and then applying that in the field. After three or four decades of courses built post-WWII that aimed to be big, expensive and anything but minimalist, Tom came along and made minimalism a credible alternative. Again, based less on novel design ideas than on applying lessons gleaned from older courses that had not been gleaned by very many other people. What most people at the time saw as a liability of those courses, Tom saw as an important asset. (BTW, I think Dye took different sorts of lessons from UK courses than Tom did. A topic for another thread.)
(To be clear, I am not saying that the Golden Age guys intended to be minimalists. They would have found the concept very odd. They did what they could do within the constraints they had to deal with. Their courses just look minimalist if viewed from a century on.)
So much of gca post-WWII has been an attempt to build big courses with carefully leveled fairways, beautifully landscaped hole corridors and smooth aprons. About 1985 a kid came along to note that the quality of the golf played on those courses was not as interesting as the game played on many classic, older courses. And, he suggested, that maybe we ought to cut back on the plowing and the landscaping and let more of the natural features of a site survive the construction process. Again, not to achieve a certain look, but because it would make for better golf.
Those were remarkable observations at the time. They can be found in Tom's Confidential Guides, in the Anatomy of a Golf Course and in a number of magazines from the period. They were, I believe, a source of much of the controversy that his writing attracted at the time. Which is a mark of their originality.
To have then successfully applied those observations in building golf courses only rounds out the case, it seems to me, for giving Tom a special place in the history books.
Bob