I concur that re-examining accepted precepts is sometimes the way to break past a seeming theoretical roadblock, or at the very least testing them for validity. Regarding the photon traveling across the universe but experiencing no time elapsing itself while events - perhaps billions of years worth of events - occur in the universe the photon is passing through, this is easily understood when we remember the light-cone of the photon (which is the area within which its local causality can work) excludes all these external events entirely.