>those 10,000 or so systems could have life, but the rest of the universe not have life.
I was thinking bigger: if panspermia gets dramatically more viable, then nebula could switch over in their probability distribution from "default sterile" to default teeming.
In this scenario, we could find (related!) life essentially everywhere, and caused by panspermia no less, despite numbers still saying panspermia is wildly improbable for mature stars.
But if OoL is extremely unlikely, the cluster panspermia idea still allows extraterrestrial life to reasonably exist and be reachable, because that life didn't require a separate highly unlikely OoL event.
I think SETI should focus on stars that look like the Sun's siblings.
The Fermi paradox assumes we'd be good at observing aliens, and that aliens will leave evidence that's conspicuous to us. These two statements are roughly equivalent, basically saying there can't be too much "impedance mismatch" between the two.
But again, even besides that, the nebula can still "teem" even though we never see any here on Earth, because the Sun vs nebula math is just so different for interstellar travel too. Many civilizations, seeded from common dirty chemistry, then permanently separated by vast distance as the star migrates out of the nebula.
TL;DR nebula parameter differences solve Fermi even in a teeming universe, but I doubt we'd see the aliens even if they were here. ;)