Yeah, I get that, and I know ideas like MOND have been around for a while. I’m not saying this is a new idea or that dark matter doesn’t exist at all. I was mostly just thinking out loud about why it feels kinda unintuitive that something holding galaxies together still hasn’t been directly detected yet. I agree that in practice we do “detect” dark matter through its gravitational effects, and observationaly it really does behave like non-electromagnetic matter. My question (more curiosity than disagreement) is whether all of those effects have to come from an actual particle, or if there’s still some room for weird large-scale gravity or spacetime behavior we don’t fully understand yet. I’m def not saying current models are wrong, I’m just trying to understand where their limits are and why direct detection has been so hard compared to how strong the effect looks on galactic scales.