We apply the method for systematic construction of the two-soliton (and in principal, N-soliton) breather solutions on the zero background to the Lakshmanan–Porsezian–Daniel model with varying dispersion and nonlinearity, gain or loss, and derive the specific conditions for the appearance of the so-called standing and moving soliton breathers. We show that both all parameters of constituent solitons forming the breather and the varying dispersion and nonlinearities should be appropriately chosen in accordance with the exact integrability conditions of the Lakshmanan–Porsezian–Daniel equation with vanishing boundary conditions. We compare the details of periodic breather dynamics for the complex modified KdV, Hirota, and Lakshmanan–Porsezian–Daniel models with the classical Satsuma–Yajima breather behavior. We derive simple formulas for the soliton breather periods and use them to understand the possibilities to control breather dynamics, and, in particular, to realize the so-called regimes of “artificial breathing”, when periods of soliton breathing in space and time are controlled by choosing appropriate complex spectral parameters defining the amplitudes and velocities of constituent solitons. Of fundamental importance is the remarkable theoretical fact that the higher-order nonlinear and dispersion effects included into (or removed from) the new higher-order equations of the AKNS hierarchy, as a rule, do not destroy soliton breathers discovered here and do not transform them into dispersive waves. On the contrary, we demonstrate that novel and novel soliton breathers can appear in the framework of the next, more and more higher orders of the AKNS and NLSE hierarchies.