I would suggest that you're putting an overly strong emphasis on the job title rather than the other benefits and responsibilities of the role. (Pro tip: titles are free. Just look at any sales org -- literally everyone is a VP of something!)

While it's true that companies want people who can grow, it gets harder to measure growth as you become more and more experienced -- and almost by definition, your expertise becomes narrower and narrower. The real-world mimics academia in this way fairly well. Getting a Bachelor's degree is about broad learning, while getting a Master's is about specializing. Getting a Doctorate is about specializing so narrowly that you improve the academic world just a tiny bit. (Brief visual explanation of what I'm talking about is here: http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/)

What you've described sounds less like merit and more like responsibility. You have more responsibility than you had before. You aren't necessarily a better programmer than you were before, or a better communicator, or a better anything else. But you did take on more responsibility. And if you read my original post above, you'll see that companies love that! In fact, they WANT you to take more responsibility! On top of that, most companies are willing to overlook most other shortcomings in the pursuit of giving you more responsibility! Why? Because it's cheaper for them to give you a modest-to-large raise if you'll take that additional responsibility than it is for them to hire a brand new person to do that instead. So you get a raise... and probably a title change, whether you "deserve" it -- from a merit, as in "I have actually leveled up" perspective -- or not.

To your point yes, once you get to a PhD (or in your case, to an Architect title), it's difficult to advance further, because there's... there's nothing past that in a well-defined way. But that doesn't mean you can't learn and you can't grow. You may have the title of Architect, but it's also totally possible that you aren't a PhD-equivalent in your field. It sounds like you may agree with that statement. Pardon me if I'm wrong on that.

Going back to my first sentence, my recommendation would be to put less emphasis on the title and more emphasis on comp, benefits, and the value of the work. I'm a VP of Engineering at my current role, and there isn't much upward mobility for me here (the CTO isn't going anywhere, for example). But I would happily go be a Director of Engineering -- a title cut! -- at another company, assuming I felt the rest (comp, benefits, and my enjoyment of the role) was a lateral-move (preferably better!).

In other words, an Architect at a 200 person company may be the equivalent of a Staff Engineer at a 2000 person company and a Senior Engineer at a 20,000 person company. And those larger companies can likely pay better and offer more benefits than the smaller one, despite the "title cut"! Furthermore, those larger companies often have wider range of titles available. You mentioned that you went from mid-level -> senior -> architect, but many enterprise companies have many more levels than that! I've worked at companies where it went something like Engineer -> Senior -> Staff -> Principal -> Architect.

If you look at that, you may think "Well, maybe I'm actually a Staff-level engineer at that company," and you might be right. Keeping that in mind, moving to another company and taking a "title cut", such as it is, might actually be a good idea. It could be a "promotion" in many ways -- including the fact that now you have upward mobility again!