Niall,
Then it appears you accidentally stumbled onto a bigger topic than you thought!
BTW, I understand that many here may think I have a perspective as a dinosaur, but who knows. While many young designers/architects want in the biz, their perspective is obviously that it's not as complicated as some of us want it to sound.
I am not entirely sure the world including clients and the legal world is going to bend to their will. Except in rare, very clean sites (and most renovations typically qualify) I don't see permitting, cost control, or any other issue really getting easier as time goes on.....it is sort of the way of the world, at least in govt agencies. And, civil engineers actively try to keep it more complicated to justify their existence. That could work both ways, perhaps taking all legal responsibility for drainage, reducing the liability to gca/gcd, but at the same time probably adding $1 Mil to golf drainage budgets.
Times keep changing, so time will tell. But in some cases, it seems like my own generation of gca's, many of whom didn't see the need for errors and omissions insurance......until they got sued once.
I have no doubt that the "standard of care" usually mentioned in design or architectural contracts is less than that of building architecture. It's one reason I picked golf design over building design, where a mere 1/4" plan mistake results in a very cold building on winter nights, whereas I have seen measuring misses in golf of several hundred yards that still worked out okay (but a few that have not!) And, as near as I can tell, most of us, tend to argue that lesser standard of care if and when we get involved in a lawsuit, even as an expert witness. I would go so far as to argue that ASGCA sort of leads the way in this.
I recall one case where the other side testified that the "typical standard of drainage design in golf architecture was to drain the course for a ten-year storm." I can assure you, it is not, and most of us would fight any such suggestion that we do anything other than trying to eventually move water off the course. The legal term is to provide for "nuisance drainage." Or every day rain drainage, but not flood control, etc.
Most of us don't even size pipes using drainage formulas (which is tricky for me to testify to since I do size pipes according to engineering formulas) Still, there are some legalities golf courses need to follow and if you either increase drainage to property downstream, or block drainage from a property upstream, you will hear about it, so some training and expertise level is required. Sure, after charging an owner 10% to design his golf course, you can inform them that they need to pay another 10% to a civil engineer to design drainage (and for certain legalities, they need a civil engineer anyway, such as flood storage, subdivision drainage, etc.) but us old timers liked to think that a professional golf course architect could competently provide a drainage plan for golf purposes that allowed the course to reopen in full in a reasonable amount of time.
But again, there are many that would argue that all of that is outside the purview of a golf course architect. I used to laugh that our standard contracts spend a few pages telling the owner what we would do for them, but over time, there were 3X the number of pages telling them what we wouldn't do for them, which required outside experts (irrigation, USGA greens mix, drainage perhaps, tree health, environmental permitting, and so on.) No doubt the world got more complicated. IMHO, some young architects are unreasonably counting on everyone else coming back to their way of thinking that it's really just playing in the dirt.
Going back to the OP, I do think many see a difference in the term golf course architect and golf course designer. At least, I knopw it is something I have seen debated among my peers, albeit, not to a definitive conclusion.