I think you are on the right path, but that there are more layers of paradigms to peel away.

I would start by saying my background isn't academic, but agricultural. Phsyics is what happens, not what is modeled.

I think the primary bias our situation generates is the perception of time.

As mobile organisms, our experience is as a sequence of perceptions, logically required to navigate. So we perceive time as the point of the present, moving past to future. Though the reality is that change turns future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns.

The varied cultures around the world adopted a range of concepts along the spectrum from linear to cyclical and circular. Though the Northern European view, from which the modern field of phyics rose, tends to take the linear view, of the point of the present moving past to future, which is codified as measures of duration and mathematically treated as similar to a spatial dimension. Though a fair number of fudges and patches are incorporated to give it some semblence of coherence.

This "blocktime" model only works on the most abstract level.

For instance, there can be no literal "dimension" of time, since the past is effectively consumed by the present, to inform and drive it. Causality and conservation of energy. Cause becomes effect.

Time is asymmetric because it is a measure of action and action is inertial. The earth only turns one direction. Entropy is a second order effect and not what's actually being measured.

Different clocks can run at different rates simply because they are separate actions. Think metabolism.

That society involves getting everyone on the same page, following the same narrative, playing by the same rules, using the same measures, it might seem there should be a universal Newtonian flow of time, but there is rabbit time, turtle time, tree time, etc.

As an effect of activity and not a geometric dimension, time is similar to temperature, pressure, color, sound. Frequencies and amplitudes. Time is frequency, events are amplitude.

Ideal gas laws correlate volume with temperature and pressure, but they are not considered dimensions of space, because they are only foundational to our emotions and bodily functions, not the sequence of thought.

Energy is "conserved," because it is the present, not a dimensionless point between past and future. It creates time, so there is no physical past for it to be left in, nor future from which it arrives.

As process and present, energy goes past to future, while the patterns it generates go future to past.

Consider that with a wave, the energy is what drives and manifests it, while the form, the fluctuations, rise and fall.

With a factory, the product goes start to finish, while the production line goes the other way, consuming material and expelling product. As lives go birth to death, while life moves onto the next generation, shedding the old.

Consciousness also goes past to future, while the perceptions, emotions and thoughts it manifests go future to past, but it is the heart and gut processing the energy driving us, while the mind sorts and orders the patterns produced. Thus the tendency to think in terms of order and chaos, signals and noise, rather than energy and form.

So we exist in this state called the present, with our minds constantly seeking useful information. Being tactile, tactical creatures, we first focus our manipulative abilities on what can be handled, thus the importance of objects and the material, rather than the processes and networks giving rise to them and the context in which they exist. So our models of reality are still atomic based, that there is some fundamental level of objects, currently strings, whose interactions give rise to everything else.

Yet consider the most prevalent entities in space, galaxies. In which energy radiates out, as form coalesces in. As we are driven by our desires and appetites and guided by our judgements, distilled from the cacophony.

What is space? Is it three dimensional, or is that a mapping device, like longitude, latitude and altitude?

If all intermediate properties are removed from space, its remaining qualities are infinity and equilibrium. Which is implicit in Special Relativity, as the frame with the fastest clock and longest ruler would be closest to the equilibrium of the vacuum, the unmoving void of absolute zero.

So space is the absolute and the infinite.

Then what fills space is this energy and the forms it generates. Of which, the energy radiates out, toward infinity, as the forms coalesce in, toward equilibrium.

Both entropic.

So it does follow a path of least resistance, but it is a feedback loop.

If they want to find the reason for the excess gravity, consider that maybe, gravity is not so much a property of mass, as mass is one end of the spectrum of gravity. that inward curvature, condension and consolidation, that starts with quantization and waves.

It has been pointed out that while single spectrum light will only redshift due to recession, multispectrum light "packets" do redshift over distance, as the higher frequencies dissipate faster.

Yet that would mean we are sampling a wave front, not individual photons.