You are not the first to think of this, or even the hundredth. It's been decades since I first saw it, but I did see someone propose kind of an interesting app

You are not the first to think of this, or even the hundredth. It's been decades since I first saw it, but I did see someone propose kind of an interesting approach, for amusement: why not take the aether thing as far as it could go? Keep adding bizarre properties to it to explain experimental results. Go wild! If I recall, the end result was something very much like the properties of spacetime. But with no particles. Just ... take the particles away. You're attached to the particles. The reason you cannot let go of that feeling is that you're trying to attach your base human experience (which is largely Newtonian, low spacetime curvature, quantum effects not immediately visible, a fairly confined region of temperatures and pressures) to a domain where your base experience is completely irrelevant. All of the waves you witnessed were the disturbance of matter as a traveling phenomenon. It's what you grew up on. And so envisioning a scenario wherein the wave isn't carried on some kind of matter, however hidden, "feels" wrong. Also, don't do physics without math. If you just want to keep reaching from one analogy to another, you can build all kinds of castles in the sky, but you won't have anything at the end of it. Remember, physics is a quantitative prediction. Your concepts have no math or calculations, and so there is no measurement to contradict them. Nor can you "farm the math out" to other parties. Nobody capable of doing the math will do the math for you. If you desire to pursue this, you must begin to do the math, yourself.