Sorry, you understood time dilation correctly until this very sentence. I read it quickly the first time because I was thrilled you've had understood the whole deal. My fault.

When you travel to Andromeda at light speed, you don't arrrive by 1:00.0001 Earth time. You arrive there by 1:00.0001 on your wrist watch. You (and the Earth photons) carry that timestamp during your journey, but Earth is already 2.5 million years older when you arrive to Andromeda.

If you ask some Andromedan to take a look through a telescope to convince him you're right, he will indeed see a clock on Earth ticking at 1:00.0001 as you say. So your wrist watch ticks at the same time than the photons arriving from Earth. You feel you just arrived in an instant (like the photons that came with you and hit the telescope). But those very same photons are, at the same time, 2.5 million years old for Andromedans.

I hope you finally understand that there are no further possible shortcuts to take, because the photons and gluons ARE the shortcuts already.

They are not wormholes connecting points just in space, they are wormholes connecting points in spaceTIME.