What if some basic point is being overlooked?

I would argue it is time.

As mobile organisms, this sentient interface our body has with its situation functions as a sequence of perceptions, in order to navigate, so our sense of time is the present moving past to future.

The evident reality is that activity and the resulting change turns future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns.

There is no dimension of time, because the past is consumed by the present, to inform and drive it. Causality and conservation of energy. Cause becomes effect.

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

Energy is conserved, because it manifests this presence, creating time, temperature, pressure, color and sound, as frequencies and amplitudes, rates and degrees.

Ideal gas laws correlate volume with temperature and pressure, but we don't confused these as dimensions of space, even though they are as foundational to our emotions and bodily functions, as sequence is to thought.

The energy, as presence, goes past to future, because the patterns generated come and go, future to past. Energy drives the wave, the fluctuations rise and fall. No tiny strings necessary.

Consciousness also goes past to future, while the perceptions, emotions and thoughts giving it form and structure to future to past.

The digestive system processes the energy, feeding the flame, while the nervous system sorts the patterns, signals from the noise.

Three dimensions are a mapping device, like longitude, latitude and altitude. The conceptual factors of space are infinity and equilibrium.

The frame with the longest ruler and fastest clock is closest to the equilibrium of the vacuum. The unmoving void of absolute zero. So space is zero to infinity.

Galaxies are the energy radiating out, toward infinity, as structure coalesces in, toward equilibrium.

Given anything actually falling into the black holes are shot out the poles as quasars, which are like giant lasers and lasers are synchronized light waves, it would seem the centripetal dynamic of structure, ie, gravity, is the synchronization of the waves.

So if gravity is not so much a property of mass, as the characteristics attributed to mass are an intermediate state of this centripetal effect of structure, interacting with the foundational energy, there would be no need for Dark Matter.

The music is more real than the matter.