That very much depends on the ambitions of both contracting parties. What sounds fair can very quickly become a problem...
That I, so to speak, am a "customary 'architect' model" is not exactly "born to take Gerddieter’s faith in the good in people away," but an honest intellectual who studied architecture quite peacefully and without nasty ulterior motives. Your personal architect trauma – I have surely already pointed out to you that communication is a sender-receiver matter and not a perpetrator-victim issue, and that identifying a disturbance based on the outcome does not mean that someone must have acted culpably and intentionally out of base motives – should not "serve" to make all builders fundamentally afraid of the architect as a greedy-sneaky-cunning monster who is just waiting to stick out his tongue for the fly ;-)
You think you are still in the preliminary investigation phase and want out of the contract – then the architect thinks he has actually already "created" a permit-ready design and demands appropriate payment... and there you have your point of dispute...
Your personal trauma, as I said, with all due respect, but objectively that is just nonsense. "Preliminary investigation" in the sense of the HOAI means reading the development plan, the soil survey, and so forth. Playing around with preliminary drafts is already the "preliminary design" and takes place in dialogue with the builders, so they cannot be ignorant about the progress. I was not present at your formulation of the architect’s assignment and therefore unfortunately cannot tell you how and where exactly you laid the foundation for your unhappy course. But I see no reason for a general presumption of malice against architects, even though some of them provide grounds for a presumption of incompetence (regarding which I have already explained elsewhere how, for example, a misjudgment in cost estimation arises).