I remember the liner notes from the DSMMN album where Gord says the strings were a surprise to him, the producer did it without his knowing, but he was pleased with the result. The next heavily produced album he did after that was SDYS, of course and also his first on WB and I'm sure the label pushed him towards strings. I suspect that if he really did like the result of DSMMN, that he didn't resist going that way. Although it's worth noting that he followed the BHOE pattern a little bit with the following album, SSOL, which was a fairly stripped down Nashville record with no strings, well except some fiddle playing.
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the PeeWee steel seemed to replace the desire for "sweeping" strings, then Heffernan similarly with keys following that era
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Yeah, I always thought that he added steel to better fill in his live tracks and once he did that, he started to get away from tons of studio tinkering on the albums (well, until the mid 1980s at least)
Back to Lee Holdridge - I always liked his work with John Denver. Didn't he also jump on with the handful of re-recordings for the first JD Greatest Hits album? His arrangement for The Eagle and the Hawk was an improvement on the original which only had piano and organ. (Not that the original version was bad either, in its own right)
I've got a vinyl copy of Holdridge's album of JD covers, pretty much elevator-music versions of his songs, but I like some of the tracks. A little Googling and found that whole album is on youtube:
-Andy