Thanks for your call, and your somewhat nuanced way of bringing your frustration.
Without wanting to derail your thread, I have one point to chime in;
It is exactly the Googles of this world that are afraid of this to happen, that is the reason for the first and last point you mention (geotags, Android dev).
@NextCees and me tried to debug why he was unable to upload certain files from his phone, while I was able to do so.
It turns out that the issue is the same as the one you mention with the metadata: Google does not allow the Nextcloud client access to most files on your phone. It does allow access to some media files, but will strip metadata “as a service to the user”, apparently unless you turn of “Safe sharing”