Interesting that you use aether exchange to fuzz particles, which is very similar to matter action.
An atom in an excited state has an oscillating EM field that is as you say dipolar, not spherical of course. There are states that are quadrupolar and even higher polar, but just keep it dipolar. The only meaning to a free photon is one that binds that atom to another atom in a coherent superposition. You are right when you say this is circular in the sense that that excited state can collapse back to the precursor or to the outcome atom. However, that excited atom is not going to stay excited and eventually will collapse.
You are also right to wonder about when momentum transfer occurs, but that is equivalent to worrying about when wavefunction collapse occurs.
Ground state atoms still oscillate and that is the source of dispersive force, which is dipole-induced dipole. Dispersive em force has good classical meaning, but falls off as 1/R^6. Beyond a certain radius, the 1/r^2 dispersive force of gravity then takes over, which is the source of graviton noise.
Now we are back to the theme of this article. The oscillation of a ground-state atom is normally incoherent except for the very important creation photon. The phase of the creation photon is still anticorrelated with the ground-state atom oscillation, but the creation photon is now at the universe radius and so gravity dispersion is only 1e-39th of that of charge.