I enjoy reading your posts, please forgive me for jumping into the aether..

Electrons were not discovered for another thirty years, after Maxwell's death. He was not aware of their existence or that they emit photons/light or that they are associated with electromagnetic fields. The "knowledge" that light is an electromagnetic wave has persisted ever since.

A word of caution: there are many types of light "emission". E.g. the emission of light due to an electron "falling" into a lower energy level "orbit" around a nucleus.. (photo-electric effect) or bremstrahllung, synchrotron, gamma-rays, etc. The generation of this light can be easily visualized by simply considering that a charged particle has an electric field extending out from it to great distances. Accelerating this charged particle therefore changes the associated field as seen from some distant point. The ripple in the field as the change in field moves out from the accelerated particle is called "light". If the acceleration of the charged particle is sudden and of short duration, and quantized (fixed to a certain set of energies) we call the change in field that moves from the location a "photon". If the acceleration is continuous we don't call it a photon but e.g. a radio wave.

... and light is not an electromagnetic wave.

... No, absolutely definitely not. The EM fields are NOT waves. I have suggested above that light is not a wave. The aether is not a wave carrier.

I'm not sure what you could mean by this. It is a mathematical fact that any continuous function can be expressed as a linear combination of waves (Fourier). Therefore we can describe the electromagnetic field everywhere in the universe as a superposition of waves. I can think of no other phenomenon than light that more clearly satisfies the many criteria we use to describe things as waves. Extremely linear over 20+ orders of magnitude, obeying simple wave equations, etc. When an author says he hears a voice "cracking in over the aether" we understand that the voice had been transferred to radio waves and then picked up with a radio receiver.

The question of "what is a wave" has been debated by many philosophers. If interested I recommend the introduction to Whitham's "Linear and non-linear waves" which is available in the "look inside" preview feature at amazon.com. Light seems to be a prime example

PS Electromagnetic fields DO NOT affect photons. Electrons (photon emitters) are affected by electromagnetic fields.

Yes, I think you are referring to the remarkable linearity of the EM field in vacuum. One wave component can pass right over another with no effect on either. However as some others have pointed out there are some interactions such as the Zeeman effect which do affect light. When other charges are considered such as in prisms or other media the propagation can become more nonlinear. Probing the limits of linearity of light in vacuum are one of the only means we have to diagnose the constiuents of the aether, er, electromagnetic space-time vacuum.