Google Photos: Better But Still Not There Yet

Another trip and another tedious work on combining photos from several sources into a single coherent album. I decided to leave my workhorse laptop at home. It has the Adobe Ligthtroom installed and is where I do the complete "professional" image processing.
So here is the gear we have on the go:
- a Nikon D5500 DSLR set up to record RAW (Google Photos plays nicely with Nikon RAW);
- a Nikon D750 DSLR set up to record RAW on one SD card and JPG on the 2nd card. The JPG setting is for historical reasons while sharing RAWs was not an option. It is probably not needed now;
- three Android phones and a Pixel-C tablet (each taking a photo from time to time)
- a (relatively old) MacBook Air with Chrome and Google Photos uploader and a USB-to-SD adapter
- a Garmin fēnix watch used to capture the GPS locations for geotagging the DSLR photos

Initially I planned the trip without the MacBook, which is the only computer with a real, file-based OS in the setup. But despite the promising Satechi USB-C hub fitting nicely he Pixel-C, Android failed to recognize the high capacity (128GB and 256GB) SD Cards. MacOS does, but it adds yet another device to the bulk.

The DSLR cameras have their clocks always set up to UTC, to prevent hassles with time zone synchronization. Unfortunately the photo time-stamping process does not include the time one information. This is a fail. This time zone information is entered in a camera, but not attached to the individual files. So you end up with a photo taken on, say, Dec 25th, 8AM, but this may be 8AM Hawaii or 8AM Hong Kong (18 hours difference). This ends up in messing the order of photos taken with DSLRs and with phones, because phones are always on local time.

We've been using the Google Photos Shared Albums feature, which is a great step forward, but still lacks some very basic things like time offset correction for each contributing device. There no way to upload a GPX location trace file either, so I will be still going to manually match the Garmin output file with DSLR imports in Lightroom. And re-exporting to Google Photos again.

I appreciate the fact Google Photos is the best photo sharing platform on the Planet today. I just cannot accept the fact the native Android devices are not capable of reading standard (i.e. >64GB) capacity cards and there is no way to properly synchronize time zone information. Combining content from several sources has gotten a tad better over the last 15 years. But is is still mainly a manual process that cries for streamlining. It would be just great if Google, despite the fact more and more of us use smartphones as primary cameras, accepted the fact some still use and will be using dedicated cameras for taking photos.

Couldn't my USB-C equipped phone just read an SD-card, ask for a time shift (or estimate it automatically) and import the content instead of offering to format the card erasing all the content? Or am I asking for too much?