There's at least one science fiction writer who had similar thoughts and wrote a story [1] where the FTL is pretty much the only technology in which the FTL aliens who visit Earth are ahead of us.
There's a good deal of Turtledove in my perspective on this, yeah. His academic study of history lends a perspective few if any other authors in my experience share; my own study of the same subject, though entirely amateur, tends to make his counterfactuals seem more plausible rather than less, by which I infer both they and their consequences in his stories are drawn with scholarly care.