Vamos a ver…

One can try to craft scenarios that try to split between those two branches, but I haven't come up with anything very credible. For instance, it is just faintly possible that this whole thing is one gigantic ten-thousand-way misunderstanding, but even then I find it hard to believe nobody in any position to get to the bottom of such a thing did and then did something sensible with the result.

At this point I pretty much won't believe anything they say, in any direction. No matter what the truth may be, "they", for all suitable values of "they", have burnt all their credibility already. No matter what the truth is, "they" have clearly been throwing up vast quantities of smoke for decades now.

I say this without much opinion on what the truth is, because this is independent of any particular person's beliefs on the matter. Nor do I have strong opinions on who "they" is; yes, I'm using it as a pronoun without a referent, but at least I'm doing so knowingly. I don't know who exactly is doing this and "they" is just the grammatically-correct way to express that in English. No matter what you believe and no matter what the truth actually is, I think this is a fair assessment.

i doubt there will be official popular contact in my lifetime, but orienting a nuclear and AI capable civilization to a place relative to others seems timely.

AI is the perfect (and necessary) bridging and filtering tech for transferring ideas from a more advanced civilization, as it's an integration layer. it's "us" as the sum of our knowledge, but its notionally superior, and can be adapted and expanded, where it's a proxy or buffer for ontological shocks.

im optimistic on this.