Well you can just fold the vines back on themselves to make the plant take up less linear space. But in my climate, with fiercely hot summers, I always wonder if a very long vine puts the tips too far from where the water is coming in. That is, keep the pipes short. Though it's not even completely clear that laterals will do that. I do find it odd that you only had one squash per 5-7 feet of vine. Did you do any hand pollination?

I did no hand pollination. The plants were in outdoor raised beds. I just let the tip run out of the box and along the ground between boxes.

And do outdoor squash need to be hand pollinated? The zucchini did very well without hand pollination.

Sometimes they do, and sometimes they don't. Sounds like you had pollinators around, but maybe they didn't like the spaghetti and butternut flowers. Were there a good number of male and female flowers? If not, then even hand pollination wouldn't have helped much. BTW, too much nitrogen could discourage flowering and promote blossom drop, and produce exactly the kind of wild growth you were seeing.

I'll have to research male v female blossoms for squash. Figured it out last year for my long english cukes. I don't really know nitrogen content, I assume that can be tested for?

No, nitrogen levels in the soil are not stable. Too much nitrogen would occur from excess fertilization.

I would suggest just getting bush varieties. I know there is a butternut variety Butterbush, and there is a semi-bush spaghetti squash Pinnacle and a bush variety Tivoli. There may be others. IME they tend to break the bush habit by the end of the season but they are much smaller than vining varieties generally.

That's correct about nitrogen not being efficiently testable. I was just wondering if you had put any high nitrogen fertilizer on your bed.

good to know about the bush varieties and no high nitrogen fertilizer was applied. I did buy a general veggie fertilizer that may have been applied to the squash and if I did probably only once. It was 10-10-10 or something similar, maybe 8-10-10, I really don't remember and it's still stored away from last year.

I started tip pruning my butternuts some years ago. I leave 2 plants in the hill, wait until there's a good fruit set and then begin pruning. I generally get 15 1 1/2 to 2 lb squash from the plants.