I’m guessing by “mediating particles”, you don’t mean those affected by fields, but rather those ‘propagating’ the field, i.e. photons.

And well, my research tells me that photons don’t really exist. 🙃

Well, particles don’t really exist, in the traditional sense. They’re not solid balls flying through space. They’re rather just peaks in the EM and gravitational fields. And then, if you’ve got a disturbance in a field, a peak or wave will travel along the field, which propagates that disturbance. And if you’ve got all that internalized, then you could call that peak/wave a “particle” again.

Here’s a rough source / different explanation of those claims: https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/201

But yeah, I don’t think this particle analogy is helping us here. We’re ultimately still just talking about a field being affected by gravity.

(Still, thanks for the input. I’m sorting my thoughts as I go, and reading that I’ve also been subjected to an unhelpful analogy is helping it make sense.)

Well you can say that about anything can’t you?

wE dOnT kNoW wHaT rEd iS!

We can name thousands of variations of the color red, we can measure the wavelength of the light that produces the color red, we can build machines and devices that manipulate matter at the quantum level to produce the color red, and yet… it’s still impossible to actually say what red is, and no one knows if what they perceive as red is the same as what others perceive.

So ya we don’t “know” the ultimate true nature of gravity, and yet…

…even babies and simple animals learn and understand that gravity exists, and we can measure gravity to astonishing levels of accuracy, and we understand gravity enough that we can launch a rocket up into space that then launches a probe that can travel millions of kilometers through space over several years and land on the surface of a comet that’s travelling tens of thousands of kilometers an hour, but ya… “we don’t know what gravity is”

If you can spend your entire life studying the mountains of data and literature that we have amassed about a topic, then is it honest to say we know nothing about that topic?