Managing Accounts and Directories

Currenly we are doing it manually - but am investigating triggering the user creation using our Helpdesk software using the API

Bleh, ours is a mess too. We have an automation set up that runs daily to ingest new/changing student and staff data into our directory, BUT have experienced a lot of pain with 1. ensuring updates to contact info are treated as updates and not new contact records and 2. deleting orphaned records.
For issue 1, we've started creating custom unique IDs that are concatenations of various IDs found in our source system (PowerSchool) - it's not perfect, but our data model is set up to have 1 contact per parent, per phone number, so it's better than nothing. (Before we did this, a new contact was created every time an email or phone number changed, which was getting crazy!). We've also gotten some suggestions from Qualtrics support about different ways to structure our data model (ie, create 1 directory with 1 row per student, and 1 directory with 1 row per parent...) but are still figuring out what we want to do...
For issue 2... It's silly, but once a week, I've started going through and setting one field (Ex. DOB) to equal "N/A" or some random value for all contacts in the file, and then deleting every contact who does not have that value in the field (ie, orphaned records who no longer exist in our source system.) The next week, I'll change it to some other value (ex. N-A instead of N/A...)... Our automation is also set up to set an embedded data field called ed_dsc_exclude (I have no idea if this is unique to our setup or something others use?) to "yes" when a student's enrollment status, or a staff member's employment status, becomes inactive - so they don't get the survey distributed, and are filtered out of our dashboards --- but they still exist in the directory until someone goes in and deletes them. I know there's API tooling available to delete users - stumbled across in this post https://community.qualtrics.com/XMcommunity/discussion/10560/contact-deletion-automation - but we haven't really started thinking about setting this up yet. We also periodically take snapshots of our data so that if contacts are deleted, we have some history of their responses, in case we ever need them... (I don't think we have yet, but I guess you never know.)
No idea if any of that is helpful, but I loved finding this post because managing our directory contacts has been a HUGE headache over the last year and we're super interested in learning what others are doing! Surely there must be a better way.... 😅