Renormings preserving local geometry at countably many points in spheres of Banach spaces and applications

We develop tools to produce equivalent norms with specific local geometry around infinitely many points in the sphere of a Banach space via an inductive procedure. We combine this process with smoothness results and techniques to solve two open problems posed in the recently published monograph [GMZ22] by A. J. Guirao, V. Montesinos and V. Zizler. Specifically, on the one hand we construct in every separable Banach space admitting a $C^k$-smooth norm an equivalent norm which is $C^k$-smooth but fails to be uniformly Gâteaux in any direction; and on the other hand we produce in $c_0(\Gamma)$ for any infinite $\Gamma$ a $C^\infty$-smooth norm whose ball is dentable but whose sphere lacks any extreme points.