@ashkitten sounds like your gpt tools are doing bad things? I highly recommend the gdisk family of tools, they do the right things all the time, especially for stuff like SSDs where other partitioning tools will let you do things that shoot yourself in the face, like non-aligned partitions and stuff.

gpt itself is a huge improvement over what came before, but a lot of the older tools that were retrofitted with support (I'M LOOKING AT YOU, FDISK!!!!) do a really bad job. 😔