I've long held that scientists are being tricked by red shift.
If you've ever shined a flashlight through a glass of muddy water you'll see it's been red shifted a great deal over less than a foot.
If the universe is just dirty space filled with unlit - ergo "dark" - matter, then light would bounce all over the place and red shift as it slows down - making distances assumed to be much farther away because of the amount of red shift.
Then they are not really so far away and any calculations about expansion or distance are meaningless because they are based on a false set of premises.