Yes: out of an abundance of caution, the unique (by SHA) variations of each asset are copied into your library. There are heuristics that pick which is the "best," and although those heuristics seem to be robust for most beta users, I didn't want to be the source of want data loss.
> datestamp info in the filename?
The metadata in the file is trusted more than any date extracted either from the filename or the directory hierarchy. Details are here: https://photostructure.com/faq/captured-at/
If you use the info tool, it'll tell you how it's extracting the date from any given file: https://photostructure.com/server/tools/#file-information
> slow to sync
PhotoStructure scales imports to accommodate current hardware, in Ann effort to keep the system responsive. Parallelism is limited by available RAM and CPU count. If you think it was being too conservative, please send me a screen shot of your about page (it includes both system metrics and what is thinking for scheduling limits), and if you want, debug logs, and we can look into what's going on. https://photostructure.com/faq/error-reports/#how-to-manuall...
> no map view
This is a popular feature request that I'm looking forward to building: https://forum.photostructure.com/t/support-reverse-geocoding...