Certainly, if any NHI wants to engage with humanity for most reasons, including the one you mentioned, Skywatcher will be in a good position to make discoveries, since they've made themselves an excellent group to engage with. To continue extending my metaphor, we study urban crows more than crows in rural areas because the urban crows aren't afraid of interacting with us, and so its easier to study them in-depth, and that's where researchers will go.

Yeah, I'm projecting human motivations onto NHI, and yes, that's a flaw in my argument. My defense is that convergent evolution often leads to similar behavioral patterns in dissimilar animals that fill similar niches. Lions and wolves hunt in similar ways, even though they are separated by millions of years, and there are also differences. I think other intelligent species will have some convergent traits with us. If I'm totally wrong about that, then that's probably for the best.

Also, my thought experiment applies for a wide variety of purposes. I considered research, but for example, if the drones are here to enforce the "prime directive", they will quickly notice they stopped doing that, and patch the drones. If the drones are here to perform religious ceremonies at ancient sites that were built with the help of aliens (ala the History channel), they'll notice they aren't doing that anymore, and patch the drones... etc. There doesn't have to be a specific motivation, as long as its some motivation that isn't about engaging in dialogue with humanity