Keyword sync between Lightroom and Bridge

I'm trying to switchover from Adobe Bridge to Lightroom for tracking and sorting photos. 

I have literally hundreds of keywords, lots of species and common names, in Bridge.  I need a proper photo catalog again, and Lightroom is what's there.  But....it turns out Bridge will happily export those keywords to an .xml or .txt file, but Lightroom will not import them directly because Lightroom disallows punctuation characters in keywords.

But after I worked with text edit to remove/replace all of the forbidden characters, and imported the xml file into Lightroom, it did import them, but kept all the formatting stuff...

So each of these lines came out as keywords

<?xml version="10" encoding="UTF 8" standalone="yes" ?>
<keywords version="2">
    <set name="Characteristic" disclosed="false">
        <item name="Geolocator screenshot" />
        <item name="inset closeup" />
        <item name="Landscape" />
        <set name="macro" disclosed="true">
            <item name="extension tubes" />
        </set>
        <item name="scale" />
        <item name="silhouette" />
        <item name="video" />

So 

        <item name="Geolocator screenshot" />

And not

    Geolocator screenshot

I see complaints about this going back 20 years--I presume since the introduction of one or the other of these two programs.

I want my keywords written into metadata so available across ALL apps for the future.

And I should not have to retype those hundreds of words and be limited to classifications Adobe selects, like 'People' or 'Other'.  Is this meant to be for working catalogs of thousands or hundreds of thousands of diverse images, or not?

And we're in 2026. How hard it is to code things so Lightroom can work with ALL CHARACTERS when Bridge can already do it?

I'm not the first with this complaint, nor the last.  Some come to it from Bridge, some come to it from Lightroom.

What were they thinking, to set up sibling programs and NOT sync the metadata handling?  Really, really not good customer service to make your users work this hard.  

I call this a BUG.  And I also REQUEST the feature of interoperability between these sibling programs.