It's because particles are exceptional things, not the normal, calm field they come from. If you base your theory on those exceptional thing it will be non representative or outright wrong.
That's why quantum physics is giving us weird results, because particles are exceptions, not the common state of the field.
If it doesn't depart too much from the analogy, what is the lake (water below the surface, under the field) and what is above the field?
Are we supposed to assume that the water below the surface is inside the field, and above the surface is outside of the field?
What is the non-exceptional form of the particle, or thing that makes up the particle? I guess this is the essence of your analogy, and your point is that we've spent so much time trying to identify this thing as a particle, we can't yet answer this question?
Or have I now dissolved the analogy by taking it too literally?
More than what it is, the question is what properties does it have. Anyway the object of interest is the surface.
What is the non-exceptional form of the particle, or thing that makes up the particle?
The surface.
Was trying to understand what was inside (water) and outside (air) the field to help me start thinking about what the field (surface) might be.
That means space also has to decay. And unless you want space to become non-existent far away from matter, the rate of decay must also fall off somehow as you get further away from matter.
I wonder if you could get such a space creation/decay process to match a curve that's 1/r2 at short distances and 1/r at long distances...