"Problem is finding a good paver "setter" who has a bit of creativity & vision." It's a mistake to think that paver installers are the ones that should be responsible for designing the project. Installers are primarily interested in installing the maximum square footage of patio that you will buy, and could probably care less about the layout, other than that they would prefer you provide a good one so they can walk away with pride and end up with a decent project for their portfolio. While they will design it by default, if you don't provide a design, the quality of their ideas will be on on you. If you don't have the design skills (alone or in conjunction with this forum) to design the patio, then you should be consulting with a LANDSCAPE DESIGNER, not a paver installer. Get the design done first, and then find an installer to place it. If you don't have a design (on paper) then you have nothing to bid on. In that case, every contractor you talk to will recommend different things and the pricing will be all over map. You'll have bids you can't compare with other bids because they'll all be for different things. As far as 12' vs. 14' depth, I would consider 12' the absolute minimum usable dimension. A designer would want to know the exact furniture that you're placing on the patio, and the contingencies for when you want to set up for the occasional larger group for special occasions, if that ever happens. Even if it never happens for you, it would be typical of most households. If resale (ever) is a concern, I wouldn't make the patio the absolute smallest a person can "get by" with. One that is of a size usable for a typical "family" with your size house in your type of neighborhood, would be a better choice. Rarely does anyone make a patio that they think is too large. Usually, they're wishing they had a little more space. I suggest figuring out your furniture and all uses and make the patio comfortably large enough to accommodate everything with a little extra room added. There's little point to building something new that you regret soon after you start using it. The difference in cost between barely-big-enough and comfortable is not that great. Buried utilities rarely limit a patio's placement. Water, sewer, gas, electricity are (should be) deep enough to be well below a patio. They might warrant some caution in excavation, but this is nothing to be fretting over. Irrigation lines might be shallow, but still probably won't be a problem. In the worst case scenario, if they are very shallow, they can easily be rerouted. (Some reconfiguration is likely anyway, since you don't want to be watering your patio.) Cable and telephone (if anyone has that any more) tends to the shallowest. These can both be rerouted to a lower placement or different route. Whether you abut or space it away from the structure, in order to make room for foundation beds, make the patio length (its longest dimension) be parallel to the home, not perpendicular to it. (Something said earlier made me think this was possibly going wrong.)

Call some local independent garden centers to see what they might have in stock that would suit your situation. And that you can have delivered or pick up yourself in the parking lot.

Personally, I find it important to fence any areas I want to keep my dog out of, especially the vegetable garden. I use quite a low fence that my dog absolutely can get over (she's about 70lbs and could easily jump anything but a 6ft fence if she put her mind to it) but it is enough to be a deterrent to let her know that she's not supposed to be in there. If you want to keep using the vegetable garden space, I would make a walk way around all sides of the boxes for access. And then I would put a nice fence around it with a gate for access. Essentially creating a garden space kind of like this where it's fenced off, but once inside you can fully access the raised beds to care for them. You could use something quite low if it's sufficient to keep kids and dogs out. I have something about the height of the last fence and I don't have a gate. But it's a bit annoying to climb over it each time I need to get in and out of the garden.

It's always hard to get a read on slopes from just pictures, but here it seems pretty obvious. The water is flowing along both sides of your house to the back corner of your property, and carrying down between the neighbors to the lower street elevation in front of their houses. You just need to form your grade to allow that to continue as it wants to go naturally. As far as your patio, it is lower than the grade. You need to dig down the adjacent area next to the plastic edging, under the trampoline, and probably remove the buried concrete "curb." Slope however needed alongside the wall of house towards the corner instead of towards under the trampoline. It would be good to do a test dig behind one of the concrete walls to see if there is a drain tile at the bottom, I'm guessing there is not. A french drain in RED would need to be at the bottom of the wall and run to daylight. Create a small swale in GREEN and direction of water in BLUE. Verify your neighbor's in PURPLE is not coming in to your yard.