> LR knows I deleted the images, so show them in a different way (or not marked them as new).
That's the problem - once you've deleted them within LR, you've told LR to forget that they ever existed.
May I suggest a tweak to the workflow which may do the trick, at least until Adobe comes round to your way of thinking?
I can understand you not wanting to just reject them and keep them on the hard drive, as that'll take up hard drive space. But what if you marked them as rejected, dragged all of the rejected ones to a 'delete me' folder once you've finished culling, and then switch to Explorer/Finder to delete the photos out of that folder.
The references would remain in the catalog in that 'delete me' folder until you choose to wipe the card and remove those references, but the fact that LR still has those records would solve the import problem.
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