Thanks for sharing your suggestions! With some unusual sunshine here this time of year, I ended up checking out a few of your recommendations.
Smartwatch use for Golf Pad requires a premium upgrade. They do offer a free trial to check it out before committing. I thought the watch display was clean, organized, accurate distances, scoring, shot-tracking. No aerial maps on the watch with this one, but maps are available on the phone.
I tried the My TaylorMade On Course app, but unfortunately I had issues getting the GPS distances to work. I reached out to support to get this fixed, so I'll update if I can get this working properly.
15th club apps on both phones and watches are free, and available on Android and iPhone. The watch display here was also very nice, but in a completely different way. Interactive aerial maps on the watch are the default view, which is actually pretty cool! You can change to just distances displayed if you choose. Accurate distances, scoring seemed pretty straight forward, but no shot tracking with this one.
Both 15th Club and GP have the ability to use the watch app independently from the phone. I've never used aerial maps on the watch before, so this is new to me. As kris0 mentioned, I was surprised how useful this was, specifically for hazards, bunkers or forced carries. Since it's free I'm going to continue using 15th club to see if aerial maps is my visual preference.
I attached a couple pics of the watch displays.