And as a kid of a family who mostly took pictures of the monuments and landscapes, it hurts a lot to just see 3-4 pictures with us in it out of 24 (or 25-26 if you were lucky).

Same, we went to the US a lot when I was a teenager. I have many good/fun memories of all the places we visited together, people we met, etc. A few years ago I went through some of the photos that my parents still have with about the same ratio of pictures with us in it. Random desert shots are even more frequent than people shots :).