Too Deep a Well

What if, just what if, the majority of planets with complex life are not like Earth. What if instead they tend to be much higher mass on average? Earth's gravity is high enough that it might be physically impossible to build a space elevator. It is easy to imagine a world with a bigger gravitational well, a thicker atmosphere, and complex intelligent life that has never even visited its moon because the engineering problems are nearly or completely insurmountable. Could this be a part of the solution to the Fermi paradox?