How come contacts on my phone don't show up in gmail?

[SSWAG]

I've also had these EXACT same issues on my Samsung Galaxy Note 5!!! I believe I'm on my third phone since 2009. Prior to that, I've always had Palm phones (and I owned the first Palm phone from Kyocera back in the year 2000). It was the horrible Palm Pre that screwed up the whole process from the beginning. With the doubling, and tripling, my contacts are up to over 5,000!!!! It's been such a pain in the ***. Sometimes when I add a contact on my phone, it doesn't show up on my Google account (Gmail) - and vice versa. Another thing that aggravates me is that Android seem to merge contacts together without my permission (many times, I don't know this until I search for the contact and can't find it). I'm sure my settings are correct and there's no rhyme or reason as to why these issues keep happening. Why hasn't any tech or customer service rep from Google's Android dept. addressed these concerns or posted a comment on this thread? What is the fix or what can be done to prevent this from happening again??? ~Jeff