It truly stinks that you are being forced to change your plans. I will say that when we built out last pool, we decided to have expand out paver deck and we did not pull a permit. Not sure if our county rules are different, but perhaps an option after the fact.
Yeah. I've been coming up with endless schemes around the issue but because the PB is doing footers for the screen enclosure I think we are a bit stuck.
My first thought was to just have the PB build out the permitted pool and decking without the footers. Then expand the the pool area myself or through a 'handy person' that would pull permits. The have the screen company come in a pour the footers themselves and add the screen.
However, we're a little scared to try to scheme out something like that and later get stuck in a situation because the city won't approve something because of a previously un-permitted change or an issue with the screen company not being able to pour footers for the screen because we would already be over the impervious coverage limit.
I think ultimately the pool will still be amazing and we'll love it but it's just annoying to spend so much time designing and coming up with what we thought was perfect to only have to change it in the end.