Automatically import photos from Desktop Pictures folder

I've already seen that the "Auto Import" requires an empty folder in order to work. This doubles the amount of work required to add photos. Photos have to be moved from the camera to the empty folder, then after Lightroom autoimports, the images have to be moved to the appropriate folder in Lightroom and on the desktop. Boy, that's a great timesaver Adobe.
I have nearly 20,000 photos in my Pictures folders. These are obviously organized into folders. The largest of my folders is my Travel Photos folder, because I'm a travel writer. In the Travel subfolder, I have subfolders for each county, state/province, and city I've visited. When I return from a trip, I move the photos into the appropriate subfolder.
How to I get Lightroom to automatically find these new photos without going through the manual import process -- which is far more efficient than the Auto Import?

I want autoimport to monitor my Pictures folder (E:\Pictures). When I try to modify the settings, it tells me that I can only direct autoimport to an empty folder. With 19,000+ images, my Pictures folder is far from empty.
There appears to be no workarounds according to the Lightroom user manual from Adobe. The manual says that autoimport cannot read subfolders.
This is definitely an upgrade that's needed. I can't imagine how any photographer would want to go through all the extra work for the autoimport.

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