I hate to tell you, this is not news to me. But if you think it makes sense to argue that "characterizing photons as particles is a poor choice" on the basis that "the standard model has not unified gravity and quantum mechanics", I'm afraid I've lost your train of thought. Again, I can only point to the accurate calculations made by practicing physicists that quite successfully treat photons as particles, within the context of what "particle" means in quantum mechanics, not the casual way many nonphysicists might use the term. I suspect the latter is what you are doing, but such casual usage of "particle" is neither precise nor scientifically useful. On another thread, it was pointed out that the word "space" is used very differently at different levels of abstraction, and the same is true with the word "particle"-- it is not a phrase that means the same thing to you as it does to a "particle physicist".