the probability wave expands briefly, emits another photon while it collapses back.
It's annoying, but observations on that scale are very very hard.
Basically what you are saying - please correct me if I'm wrong - that there are intermediary states between quantum states that we can not observe. Sort of an analog vs digital issue. But even if we can not observe them they are real.
This all really boils down to the discrete time argument.
There is a 'basic' unit of time, a 'quantum' of time, below which on our macroscopic level of the world things move from one discrete state to another. Whether or not all the atoms in the universe change state in lockstep or whether or not they all have their own little sense of 'time' is afaik an unknowable.
And as long as that is true we are doomed to interact within the framework, and access to any sublevels is automaticaly denied.
For an analogy, think of a building with an elevator. You can get off at the floors, but not 'between' floors, and whatever is between the floors is invisible to you, even if you can speculate about them being there, and arguably they MUST be there. As far as you know the world changes 'discrete' from one floor to another and you can not break out of the elevator without technically 'stopping time' and living outside of time. All the equipment we have is constrained by the same rules, we'd need something that's already operating on that level interacting with the real world in a measurable way in order to interact with it indirectly, and we'd need to be able to change something into that 'intermediate' state in order to interact with it directly.
I don't know if I'm making any sense here, that's as clear as I can express myself on this subject, which is far from my real field (software) but I'm interested in it enough to try to understand.