Professor Goodale,
Having been involved in planning and strategy with a couple major corporations and a federal agency, my perspective on this subject is probably a bit more technical than most. As a golfer for many years, when I hear people wax on about strategy in design and play, well, I sometimes just scratch my head.
Your suggestion of a continium is a good one. I normally think of objectives as rather loose goals, perhaps achievable, but largely idealized and undefined. Strategy is a macro or topside effort to bring these objectives or goals into more quantified terms which can then be tested for reasonableness and possible implementation via plans, budgets, various initiatives, etc. Another way of looking at it is that strategy is the WHAT and tactics are the HOW.
How this relates to golf is unclear to me. An architect, intentionally sometimes, provides a range of options on how to play a hole. As you noted, mother nature, the surperintendent, the individual golfer's condition that day, the competition, and a number of other extrinsic factors provide further variables. Considering that on our best days most of us can't dial up the intended swing more than a few times, what is the use of well-laid plans ahead ot time?
I think that you're right on when you said "It is more about about knowing and calculating the options, in a dynamic sense, than "planning." It is about being able to adjust, when all your knowledge and calculations are going horribly wrong (or even astonishingly right)." For many of us who have played for years, seriously some of the time, it is real time processing, perhaps with a bit of instinct. It undoubtedly involves the imagination, but it is certainly not detailed planning nor strategic in a concious sense.