As to your style differences with Pete, I have always thought that what you took away from him was if everyone is doing X, find something new to do, because you won't get famous doing another version of the same thing. With him it was RTJ curves, and Bill Coore it was following early American principles, while yours (but you tell us) minimalism to counter the massive earthmoving projects that had Dye had become known for (and others.)
Jeff:
We all have a million influences and I think it's difficult to boil it down to one or two being "the reason" we do what we do. I had seen nearly 700 golf courses by the time I started High Pointe, and most of them were pretty good ones.
I never took Pete's story about making Harbour Town different than Palmetto Dunes to be about finding a niche in the market or a trademark of his own. He phrased it as "golf can't keep going that direction". Funnily enough, the course down the street from High Pointe was The Bear at Grand Traverse Resort, and that's really what set me on the path to minimalism: I had a piece of land where I didn't need to do that, and I was trying to build "no mounds" because Jack had built so many. Having spent a year in the U.K., I was also deeply offended that courses like The Bear and Grand Cypress were being sold in America as "Scottish style", so I tried to build a course that the Scots would recognize as more authentic.
Of course, I would not have known to do any of that if I hadn't lived in Scotland and studied many of the great early American courses, so you can argue about which of them was my inspiration, but the trigger was The Bear. If you haven't seen me say that before, it's only because I was trying not to be directly disrespectful.
And yes, I was also smart enough to know that trying to copy Pete Dye would get me nowhere, because there was no way I would ever be as good at his style as he was. In fact, lots of other, established designers were already trying and failing at that. But after what he'd said to me about Harbour Town, it would not have been respectful for me to try that route, and I never really considered it.