Chuck, sorry your little girl is having problems; that's one great dog! Not sure you CAN do better for an all-around hunting dog than a smallish Lab [censored] bred and trained for upland hunting....
You might contact member Mike Cross (I'll shoot you his email email if/when I find it) for some perspective on hunting with Brits in CA; unless my memory is failing me he hunts a pair of French Brittanies here and also in Baja--"sticker city." Maybe he has a solution to the sticker/foxtail/cactus problem in longhairs.
Good that you're paying attention to the "house dog" side of your perspective new hunting partner; as we discussed in the truck, you have to be able to live with the critter about 340 non-hunting days a year, as well as in the field. I've met both Vislas and GSPs that were bird-finding machines, with all the personality of a machine....COLD dudes.
Somebody mentioned Italian Spinones. My old friend the Pasta King of Portland has a couple. Nice pets but really big for a truck/house dog, and would definitely need a buzz cut in SouCal. And they labor under some genetic difficulties; just not enough of them left in the gene pool after WWII, which was pretty hard on the scarcer breeds of dogs in rural Europe.
Hunting for a hunting dog is almost as much fun as hunting with one!
