Lessons from radio waves

* As a recreationist contemplating forces of nature, I have believed that electromagnetic fields and waves summate but do not interact among themselves, that they do interact with particles which produce, absorb, reflect, refract and diffract EM fields and/or waves.  I wonder whether that belief agrees with serious theory.
* Consistent with my belief, waves pass through fields emerging intact, opposing waves pass through each other and proceed unaffected (as in standing waves), and neighboring waves interfere constructively, a summative relation not an interactive one.  But it's hard to reconcile this belief with my belief about radio waves.
* Specifically, I believe that each phase of a radio wave is a shower of short (perhaps IR-length) photons of phase-specific spin.  The EM energy doesn’t come from the transmitter antenna as a whole, it comes from charged-particles accelerated where the EMF pulse is progressing along the antenna.  EM energy coming from an electron near one end early in a phase should not know that it is associated with EM energy coming from an electron near the other end later in that phase.
* Giving me pause is the fact that radio waves bend around obstructions, diffract in grids, filter on macroscopic polarizers and penetrate walls as if they were very long unitary photons rather than showers of much shorter like-spinning photons.  Perhaps photons contributing to a larger wave somehow interact with structures as if they were integral to the wave, implying communication across the wave (in space and time) that I wouldn’t anticipate.
*  This might be analogous to the behavior of particles in the double-slit experiment, exhibiting statistics as if responding to distant untouched structures. Attempts to reconcile the double-slit results became foundational to quantum mechanics theory.  Perhaps something enlightening will derive from attempts to reconcile particulate, spatially-separated and temporally-separated photon emission with unitary radio-wave action.  This would imply interaction among photons within a shower of photons, contrary to my beliefs expressed at the outset.