Ed Unverricht,
One of the fundamental assumptions you use to form a basis for your essay has a somewhat older parallel. "2. Matter is confined energy and energy travels at the speed of light." One of my mentors, an Emeritus Professor of Electrical Engineering, since deceased, wrote in one of his publications that everything is a specialized form of energy. I learned later that this parallels the "Theory of Energetics," which was supported by Max Planck. It is my understanding that Max Planck never accepted the existence of material particles, he viewed them all as forms of energy.
Your photon description has some good and questionable parts.
"The photon is an unconstrained piece of connected energy with no mass." -Good-
"As it travels, it is expanding and contracting, allowing it to store both kinetic energy and spin angular moment." -Questionable-
Expanding and contracting can be readily explained by the photon traveling through areas with different permittivity. By default the photon stores energy, but spin angular momentum has to be the result of an initial field orientation or an alteration of a specific directional field polarization to circular by an intervening process.
For optical frequency photons, a specially shaped lens, that exploits Snell's law, can change a transverse wave, with a specific directional polarization, to one that has circular polarization, or as it is described in optical texts, having Orbital Angular Momentum (OAM). For producing standard radio frequency photons, phase delays between the source and antenna elements are used to create circular or elliptical polarizations.
Although we know how to produce and manipulate photons, it is my opinion we really don't understand the nature of their existence. For example, it seems there has to be an optimum ratio of permittivity to permeability for essentially loss-less propagation.
