Duncan,
We do have stroke indices written right on the scorecard in America. I can't speak for the others but in my case, it's that the people in our Saturday and Sunday 9:30AM blind draw game do not want to keep track of which holes they are getting strokes. I think that's a petty attitude, given that it pretty fundamentally screws up the competition among such a wide range of handicaps but there it is.
At the club I was a member of years ago, pre-printed scorecards were provided for each group so nobody complained about the strokes being allocated properly. Each group (team) keeps there on score in our current game and it's seen as way too much work (somehow) to make a little mark of your own to indicate the holes on which you get a stroke.
Which is why I brought up the handicap system in the first place. Single-digit handicap golfers in USA are conditioned to track their score in one particular way every single round, game, practice round, team competition or other time they are out on the course. They are taught to keep track of their total 18-hole score, counting nothing higher than double-bogey on any hole. So when we have a team game it is natural to make the scoring just total 18-hole team score, counting nothing higher than double-bogey on any hole.
Nobody calls it Stableford by the way. Which is good because it is not Stableford. They just call it "points". It is not a very good way of scoring but it has the one advantage that everyone in the game is going to be keeping that exact individual score anyway to type into the computer. Except of course those of us whose course handicap is 10 or greater. We do not apply the "double-bogey" rule to our computer scores.
It screws up the competition and leads to hard feelings on the part of the 6-handicappers who know intuitively that with my 21-handicap I should not get off so easily as picking up when I miss my bogey putt. Yet they would rather have the hard feelings than actually, you know, keep a scorecard like real golfers do. And its because they are conditioned to think there is something special about that ESC scoring system that they've used 100 times a year, year after year, for every round.
BTW, for a while they tried counting "minus one point for double bogey" to "fix" the perceived problem. The 8, 9, 10 handicappers hated it and we quit after a few weeks. The problem? Once or twice a round they discovered that their bogey putts would run 4-5 feet past the hole and they'd miss them coming back. These guys have spent years picking up instead of putting out for double-bogey (ESC, you know) and hated being called on it. So for a couple weeks they tried saying only high handicappers had to putt out for double-bogey but that was quickly (and rightly) shot down as patently unfair.
All so they don't have to use the stroke index printed right on the scorecard. Amazing.