I never said it's a rigorous thing; I'm highlighting that there's too many flaws to take seriously (i.e. evidence of absence in this case tells us nothing).

Remember - it's a million to do a straight shot across the universe at quite a large portion of the speed of light. In terms of colonization we're talking billions of years for an unknown fraction of the galaxy, but definitely not the entire thing. And much of the galaxy may not even be suited for colonization (e.g. presumably you still need some raw resources & have to be careful about where you go to to expand)

As for "hiding" I never said they want to hide. But you only need to look at the modern world to realize that digital communication and encryption are standard fare and "hiding" is a natural evolution of that. And the longer distances you are transmitting and the more signals you need to monitor, the more energy efficient you want to be (i.e. point to point + relays instead of broadspectrum broadcasts). And if advanced civilizations use neutrino comms or quantum entaglement somehow, then they'd naturally be hidden just because that's how more advanced tech would work.

As for territory, I never said they wouldn't be territorial. But a lion isn't going to bother being territorial with a mouse. No reason to believe they're going to try to broadcast ownership in a way that a "stone age" species like ours could detect. Additionally, it's not impossible that communication barriers are real and therefore there's not really much to communicate out vs "show up in our heavily fortified star system & see disappear" kind of behavior.

The counter argument is that you may actually want to hide unless you're the apex civilization because otherwise the apex civilization may choose to conquer and murder yours (e.g. Europeans vs Native Americans) to prevent competition.

My point is that there's so many reasons that we're not finding anything (nonexistent priors, searching in the wrong spot, search for the wrong signals, not having enough people searching, having the wrong equipment, not even having the physics required to start searching, etc etc) that the Fermi paradox provides no insight & can't even be called a paradox yet.

If faster than light travel is possible, this changes a lot of calculus of course. But similarly, is there any reason to believe our solar system would be interesting enough for the species to come to us? Or maybe there's even political things like Star Trek's first contact rule that put us in a bubble & intentionally mask the existence of the aliens in the first place.