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First of all, there have been loads of naked eye observations, and some fraction of the thousands of captured images offer something of real interest.
And consider this—if there are, say, one to six craft visiting our planet for a few minutes per year, the odds are witheringly small that we’re going to observe them with professional telescopes or cameras. A fast-moving object between say 10 and 30 meters across is going to be really tough to spot.
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This is a common fallacy found among UFOists. First you say there have been "loads" of naked eye observations, then you say that there are almost none. Which is it? If the former, then why haven't astronomers seen them and recognized them as such? And if the latter, then why are there so many 'anecdotal observations'? The answer should be fairly obvious. The best you can hope for is that there are a very very few sightings and these have been missed by everyone. The point is that if there's anything that's going to be seen it's going to be the astronomers who will see it. They're the ones best suited to properly differentiate what is useful and garbage in the night sky.
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Night sightings are fairly easy to dismiss for reasons like those you discovered—even if someone did see an object of alien origin at night, it would be essentially impossible to prove. What I saw occurred at 3pm on a bright cloudless day—those events are much harder to explain, because the object either has to be reflective or emitting a lot of light, to be seen so brightly in mid-day. Add to that, a seeming disregard for momentum, and it’s a beguiling puzzle.
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So there's this hill in western NJ where I can see something strange in the sky with pretty consistant regularity. What it looks like is contrails from rocket launches the next township over. Don't ask me why, but for some reason jet contrails near the horizon look completley vertical from this vantage point. Now I knew that the people in the next down haven't got ICBMs but I still did a doubletake when I see it. What would someone less knowledgeable and more credulous make of that sighting? Daytime observations should be taken with just as much skepticism than nighttime ones. The daytime sky is terrrible, absolutely terrible for determining distance and scale. What is that shiny thing up there? Is it some rare cloud type (lenticular, for example) at some weird angle? Is it some kid's helium balloon? A parachutist? A hot air balloon? Someone's radio controlled airplane? A box kite? Or is it space aliens? There's a lot to go through before you even arrive at space aliens and odds are you're never going to get there if you search thoroughly enough. Of course, it may be something secret and military and you might be screwed and never find out (I wonder how many B2 bombers or F117 stealths were misidentified as UFOs). But to conclude that it's space aliens because it doesn't conveniently fit what you think it ought to be is making too much of a leap.
On a similar topic, you should also remember that eyewitness accounts are ridiculously unreliable. The human brain is not a good device for accurate remembering of details. Studies have shown that it's prone to suggestion after the fact and can be easily persuaded. Furthermore, goin over somehting in your own head more or less "rewrites" the memory in your head. The more you try to recall something, the more it becomes that ideal you were looking for in the first place. This isn't just you, it's everybody. Thats why such an emphasis is placed on physical evidence.
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I always feel like an ancient Greek when considering issues like this—think of how steeply our perspectives on travel have changed in just two thousand years. I don’t think we even know how to ask the right questions regarding interstellar travel yet. We’ve only reached space now for a few decades. We can’t even fathom how we’ll think about this issue in a thousand years. But for argument’s sake, what if they have great medicine, and can live for several hundred years or longer? Also, doesn’t GR predict that if you travel close to C, time will pass more slowly on board your craft, so that from your POV, you can reach a star a few light years away with only a few hours of subjective travel time? If your home base ages a few hundred years while your away, maybe that matters less to a civilization that’s tens of thousands of years old and where the people live several hundred or thousands of years. And that’s all assuming that we don’t make some radical revisions to our physics along the way, which isn’t a bet I’d want to make, given our recent scientific history—today’s ‘impossibility’ is tomorrow’s toy.
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why do these things always turn into 1930 serials plots? If someone more advanced wanted to observe us, a telescope from the Jupiter would be fine. heck, something from a lunar orbit would be fine. There is no need to enter our atmosphere. How many years do you think it will be before we will be able to image our own lunar landers? I expect to see those photos in my lifetime. I agree with you that today's impossiblity is tomorrow's toy, but I also remind you of A.C. Clarke's statement that "Any species technology, sufficiently advanced, will be to us indistinguishable from magic." And again, any race that advanced will see us as just another culture with the very rudiments of space travel. If they've been around that long, we're old hat. Not that interesting. And so we get back to that human conceit that we're somehow important.
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Pretty high if ‘they’ have been traipsing around the galaxy for quite some time, and higher if they’ve had a scout ship within about fifty light years anytime recently, given the endless stream of radiowaves trickling away from our planet.
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if they're moving about the galaxy that much, they've long since catalogued us, maybe when the Romans were big, or maybe when we're Austrolopithicines. You can't possibly expect me to beleive that they've waited all this time for us to develop chemical rockets? Nbo, they've done what we do - drop a probe and read telelmetry.
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We still keep tabs on remote aboriginal tribes—why wouldn’t they do the same? Especially if they know we’re going to be heading into the big city sometime soon 
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Agian the "humans are on the cusp" conceit. How do you know an FTL drvie is arund the corner? How do you know that any of the planets within 50LY are massive urban areas for some advanced culture (assuming an advanced culture is still stuck to it's homeworld - which I doubt). and even if they were, this isn't a Harry turtledove novel. The aliens are not within conveinient reach. We pose no threat or even concern.
enjoyable topic :-)
john