Norm, your gumbo looks delicious -- and just so you know, I've only had gumbo a couple of times in my life where it DIDN'T have rice. Yours has more tomato in it than I'm use to seeing but then some are in the tomato camp and some aren't. And I've seen tomato more in seafood gumbo than in meat gumbos. Your gumbo looks like one you'd have at someone's home because gumbo you ordered in a restaurant would NEVER have that much "stuff" in it -- they'd have to charge a fortune for it if they tried to serve some like yours.
It's funny, as when I grew up (and also in my family), we made meat gumbo or seafood gumbo. Now granted, our meat gumbo always had oysters in it (my mom always told me to be gumbo and not soup, it should have three "meats" in it, like turkey, andouille and oyster gumbo). And our seafood gumbo would have shrimp, crabs (and if you had the bucks, additional crabmeat) and oysters. But some people, like my best friend whose family was originally Filipino, made gumbo that had everything in it: chicken, sausage, shrimp, crab, etc. Her gumbo is delicious too and as I've gotten older, I've seen more home cooks make gumbo like that. But usually restaurants make one or the other, and I don't think I've ever had gumbo in a restaurant that includes oysters in their turkey or chicken and sausage gumbo.
Gumbo definitely doesn't always have okra. I never put okra in mine and my family rarely did. Technically, if you use okra, you don't use file powder. And we always use file powder in ours. It adds both flavor and also serves as a thickener. When I was young, it was definitely "either or" file or okra. But as the years have passed, I see recipes where people have used both. I would think it would tend to end up slimy, though, as both okra and file powder have a tendency to sometimes get slimy if you handle them incorrectly. Like tomatoes, I think there's an okra camp versus a file camp. But though okra is more popular in the south than elsewhere, it's still not a big crowd pleaser which may be the reason more cooks don't include it. I just love the flavor that file powder adds to it -- it's almost a smokiness. Whatever it is to each person, it's delicious!
I also add file to my gumbo like people used to always do when I was young. I remove some of the gumbo into a cup, let it cool, then stir in some file. Then you stir THAT into the hot gumbo. Once you've added the file, you're not supposed to let your gumbo come to a boil but that's not something most people would do once the gumbo has all come together anyway. I sometimes see people (and smaller neighborhood type restaurants) have shakers of file on the table so people can add it to their gumbo but then I'd never use it like that. But hey, you know, people move here, stay here, change things to suit their tastes or sometimes do something they thought everyone did and that's how things change. When it's served as festivals, I often see shake containers on tables, too.
I have to admit that I never heard of rice not being in gumbo before. But like I said earlier, it's not a huge portion of rice that it's served over. Maybe 1/4 cup. I always serve rice with it but when I have a second bowl (grin), I usually skip the rice!