Your last point is a good one, but there are a many ways that you could be wrong. To name one: The Von Neumann probe is a compelling model and it is more likely that we would see something fitting that description rather than the original form of an extraterrestrial intelligence. We have no good reason to think that such an advanced civilization would have mastered faster than light communication either. So the behavior of these cylinders, assuming they are VN probes, may only be simplistic surveying routines which have been running for tens of thousands of years and were not at all designed for interacting with humans. There may also be resource constraint issues present in the construction of self replicating Von Neumann probes that make the type of interaction you are hoping for infeasible, in terms of compute, agenda, or something else we aren’t aware of.