And as I continue on in my career I'm getting the sense that becoming an effective architect entails two things:
1) Gaining broad and deep contextual sense in a specific technology and business domain, usually specific to a business you've worked at for quite a while, to the point that you have a sense of the entire system and it's interactions
2) Taking advantage of iterative development, where we begin with the smallest possible system, and then gradually build on top of that system
That being said, I'm starting to question the utility of researching software architecture at all, but I'm curious if anyone has found any books or sources of information that have actually been helpful for them.
For my part, the title '97 Things Software Architects Should Know' is all I've found so far.