My crisis of faith

 *  I’ve tried to believe, really I have.  Heaven knows I’ve tried, almost every day for the past 8 years.  But I still doubt the foundations of modern physics.
  *  Regarding Special Relativity, evidence against an aether and a universal reference frame doesn’t convince me.  Regarding General Relativity, evidence that massive bodies bend light and attract other massive bodies owing to deformation of space doesn’t convince me.  Regarding Quantum Mechanics, photon properties and definitions are too paradoxical and mercurial.  It seems to me that aether is, that gravity is mediated by aethereal activity (as are electromagnetic forces), and light is aether waves.  I have no quarrel with other standard-model particles and forces.
 *  I don’t see how gravitational waves could do work on the Ligo detector and every other object in their path unless the massive objects producing the waves are impeded in the process, and that should happen even if the universe had no other massive objects to receive the waves.  That slowing must be due to interaction with aether and it must be relative to aether’s coordinates.
  *  Would existence of aether obviate the paradoxes of special relativity such as contraction of the universe in the direction of a fast-moving observer?  And by the way, two massive objects in mutual orbit would surely experience centripetal force even with no other body in the universe, revealing a universal reference frame.  The objects would approach each other as they lose angular momentum to the aether, and collide.
 *  I don’t see how a light wave could experience no time progress between leaving a source and hitting a target unless it touched source and target simultaneously, despite a wave length much shorter than the distance from source to target (eg from one galaxy to another).  An all-purpose photon definition might help.
 *  Aether is an elastic medium filling all space, the substrate of force fields; and it propagates force-field disturbances, ie energy waves.  I imagine it to be very busy with waves of every kind passing through every point randomly in many random directions simultaneously.  Waves can interact with matter particles, transferring linear and angular momenta to and from matter particles mostly self canceling or quickly reversed.
 *  And by the way #2, I suspect that gravitational lensing may be a mirage, such as we see on a hot road or desert or as allows long-distance radio  --  refraction by a transverse gradient of matter density, in these cases air density.  An extreme case of this might account for light being trapped in a black hole and in an optic cable.
 *  Waves pass through each other unaffected.  Judging from solar sails, they shove massive particles gently in their propagation directions giving their momentum to the particles in the process.  Could this effect be dark energy and shading of it be gravity?  Could gravity and electromagnetism be different blends of the same waves?
  *  I don't know whether my speculations agree with those of a prolific and thoughtful YouTuber named Robert Distinti, but I hope so.