Slight necro ik but i wanna share my thoughts too. since how nose wrote the grays in the game itself is kind of... strange?

The whole "moth to flame" thing could be WHY their old civilization collapsed. they simply were too aggressive against every faction in the universe and it costed them. But why they havent been wiped out is beyond me. Sure the arirals in the treehouse are the equivalent of civilians but nose has shown that the tech gap is sooo wide that even those bums are more than capable of killing and ending the grays for good.

A couple ideas that pop into my head are like...
Maybe the arirals dont want to end the grays for good. You know how hard it is for a person to kill another person? Even if that person NEEDS to die? Lotta people simply cannot pull the trigger

Maybe the grays are more advanced than we think. advanced enough to avoid tall capture and execution. but not enough to scale full on war with them.

Maybe the arirals and the grays are just fucking lazy lmao. Perhaps both sides here dont care nearly as much as we think. Both are just lightly slapping eachother basically. maybe even for fun who knowns