I came across this old thread trying to answer to question of how to Get an OTA updatable display that can rival the Nextion or other WYSIWYG Displays.
My device is not able to be accessed by SD card to update the display, but I may need to update the UI menus in the future.
To avoid needing to use SD cards to update your display you should use a rendering library such as Adafruit ILI9341 library so you can display your own graphics.
Simple example using Monochrome OLED.
Making Custom Bitmap Graphics:
Animations such as dials and bar sliders:
Finally: The coolest color menu screen I have found using Adafruit_GFX.
One more! Adafruit has an example where they display weather data to a screen:
This seems like the path forward for achiving what the OP was asking about.