We are not Apple. There is no point in complaining here. Leave feedback for Apple at this site:
Feedback - Photos - Apple
There may be a bit of misunderstanding about iCloud. You say:
I DO NOT want to save on the 'cloud'. I prefer a physical computer in my house to keep photos.
I use iCloud to transfer pictures among my devices, but all my pictures are stored on my Mac. They are also stored in iCloud, but my Mac is, for me, the primary storage. It's true that you don't have to keep all your pictures locally but, like you, I'm way more comfortable having full control over the pictures. And I find the use of iCloud to be way simpler than the old cable business.
On a Mac we can have multiple Libraries. One option would be to have a Library only for transferring pictures. The pictures would transfer to your Mac very quickly, and later you can copy those to another Library, and erase the pictures from the transfer Library. If you transfer fewer than maybe 500 pictures at a time, this would be free, since you get 5GB of storage for no cost.
Let Apple know what you prefer, but I'm betting that cable transfer is on the way out.