Well, no doubt I am many years late to the party, but I decided to go ahead and learn Unity/Course Forge as a hobby. One by one, I went through Mike Jones' tutorials multiple times to a point where I felt comfortable with the necessary tools to build a course. Through trial and error (many, many errors), my technique is getting better and better with each hole I build. There is just so much I do not know how to do in Unity, so I am sticking to the basics for my very first course. And for the record, I admit I am not much of an artist, so the course itself is basic... by no means will you be wow'd by this design.. but its playable, for sure.
The course I am building is basically a back of a napkin design. So while I am pleased with the layout, building it in CF is certainly challenging for me. I am using free Assets for Unity and many thanks to the long gone forum members and course designers who left their assets still available to download.
Special shout out to Jugador for answering many questions and helping me on my way to building my very first course. At some point, I will tackle the notion of using lidar data to build a course... but no way am I there yet.. not even close. Here are some screenshots of what I have so far for "The County" (9 holes) and for the record, I am not even sure I will release this course as it is certainly not up to par with what is available to play today.