Thank you, Margaret; and that's good news. You're working with the highest resolution testing available right now. What there is to tell via the yDNA, that will tell us. Of course, it still remains that we're always dependent upon the number of test takers. FTDNA recently passed the milestone of having over 100,000 Big Y test-takers, but when we consider that AncestryDNA has surpassed 23 million tests...well, it gives us an idea of the comparative scope of the picture.
A follow-up question because I'm still stumbling over what was interpreted as a close match. For each of your guy's personal dashboards at FTDNA, is the company displaying the Hutchins kits as matches both under the "Y-DNA Results & Tools" section as well as the "Big Y" section, or is the imputed matching coming only from the Group Projects they joined?
The basic yDNA matches page will show the calculated genetic distance to each match (which, by the way has no connection to the meaning genealogists might apply to "genetic distance," as in number of generations or cousinship; so for Y-STR results a genetic distance of 1 in no way equates to a single generation, for example), and clicking on the little calendar-looking icon labeled "New" to the right of each name will pull up the recently revised TiP report. These estimations are just that, and still fairly broad because the STR markers themselves are highly variable. Down at the bottom of that TiP report will be a summary of how the test-taker is estimated to be related to the match being viewed. Here is an idea of what that looks like:
Based on a Genetic Distance of 1 at the Y-111 test level, E. Williams and ____ Williams are estimated to share a common paternal line ancestor who was, with a 95% probability, born between 1700 and 1900 CE. The most likely year is rounded to 1850 CE. This date is an estimate based on genetic information only. We can't take the 1850 date to the bank, but it at least gives us a starting point.
The matching information reported under the "Big Y" section can give us additional, and usually more precise, information. But there's no analogous TiP report here other than the fairly new Time Tree (see below). Some manual analysis is required, and that really needs to include the best information possible about the various genealogies involved. Meaning that this is something most FTDNA Group Project managers don't--and typically can't--do for the project members.
Net message here is that if those Hutchins tests are not glaring out from the personal matching information at FTDNA, if they're just coming from Group Projects joined, it may be a red herring.
If you haven't already looked into it, there is a Hutchins Group Project at FTDNA: https://www.familytreedna.com/groups/hutchins/about. The membership isn't large, however; only 123. But FTDNA customers can join as many Group Projects as they wish, and that one might be worthwhile.
As for Pierce projects, those are split into two: "Pierce-Northern Surname Project" and "Pierce-Southern Surname Project."
Another immediate thing to check is the recently added "Discover Haplogroup Reports" option in the FTDNA dashboard in the section, "Big Y." That gives some summary information about what is shown as the test-taker's current "terminal SNP" (I wish we'd never begun using that terminology, but a few years ago no one could have anticipated that the yDNA haplotree would grow and change at the rate it has).
Perhaps most valuable here is the timeline estimations given: on the left-hand side of the screen, click on "Time Tree" to see the full display available. This attempts to provide the "coalescence dates" I mentioned before for the specific branches of the haplotree. It offers an approximate date that the SNP was formed, the date its ancestral SNP came to be, and a graphical display of the other, associated test-takers in context and arranged hierarchically. It won't be precise, of course, but at least it should give you the ability to arrive at a guesstimate about whether the Hutchins genetic relationship is recent, or whether it might be many decades ago.
Best of luck!