I just got an Apple Watch and had so much trouble getting my Google calendars to sync. I tried setting things up as a Google account, CalDAV, and also through alternative calendar apps. Nothing worked. I am convinced that this was all due to having access to too many calendars.
I was able to resolve this, however. I agree that the key is to link up a Google account that doesn't have a whole lot of calendars accessible to it. Not sure the limit exact, but less is more.
I have two main Google accounts: my work (where I am a Super Admin in Google Apps) and my personal account. I was trying to setup my work calendar for access. Being an admin, I have access to every user's calendar and Apple iCal was seeing this. I am pretty sure this was causing the connection to my watch to choke. Nothing was working.
My personal account is pretty clean, so I decided to try that one and it worked fine.
To get access to my work calendar, I (in Google) shared my work calendar to my personal Google account. Then back on my iPhone I included that calendar as one I wanted to download. It instantly showed up on my Apple Watch!!!
For me, I actually use the Google Mail and Calendar apps on my iPhone as my main apps. To make things work on the Apple Watch, I needed to setup Mail and iCal onto the device, but those are really just collecting the data in the background and slinging it over to my watch.