In the end it is up to you whether you can come up with a reasonable story. But to me it always seemed rather like tryharding. As mentioned in the OP, the issue with playerlisting is the fact that you don't know whether the ship is docked, in traffic area or somewhere offplane where you wouldn't find it anyway, and you don't know whether the ship is cloaked and you don't know whether the ship moved from A to B via gate, hole or jump drive. Of course there are some possibilities of eliminating certain options, but I simply wouldn't go down that rabbit hole.
I have witnessed these scenarios often enough, and the latest wasn't too long ago. It was the day when Gallia spontaneously visited Omicron Rho. They gave the Core a very short response time, only very few hours, and then Gallia's research fleet was in Rho. Of course some people read the comm from Gallia to Core and were curious. I was one of these people, so I logged my Whale and sat down at Freeport 8 in Sigma-15. I was assuming that Gallia would take the shortest route to move to Rho, which I assumed to be Picardy-Zurich-Cologne-Stuttgart-Berlin-Frankfurt-S15-Rho. It would have been the safest normal route, given Gallia is friends with Rheinland and actually sent stuff for the construction of gates to Rheinland, to Frankfurt. Then I realized that Gallia didn't contact Rheinland. So I expected them to actually jump to Rho, remembering Core gave Gallia jump drive coordinates during the Vaultcracking. So I remained at Freeport 8 and watched the playerlist, since nothing else was happening apart from Velvet Whales passing by. Turns out my second assumption was correct and they jumped. I remained at Freeport 8 still, because my Whale had no Rho visa. So I couldn't have randomly moved through Rho just to surprisingly see Gallia there.
So far so good. A BDM shared transport moved to S15 and found my Whale at the freeport. And it interrogated my Whale there, claiming there have been reports about ships having passed by not long ago. So I told them about the Velvet transports. The BDM however continued and repeatedly asked whether there had been any other ships passing by, which gave me the very distinct feeling that the player behind the ship was refering to the gallic ships in Rho, not knowing they jumped there instead of using the casual route. So while the player didn't specifically make it look like he was after the information about the gallic ships, it gave the very strong feeling that was the case. And I personally dislike that kind of situation, where someone falsely claims there have been rumors/reports abourt something the player behind these claims can't 100% be sure about. It would have looked way less cheesy if it would have been a random encounter that wasn't pushing for information about the gallic fleet. It wouldn't have looked that cheesy if those claims wouldn't have been made up, because they were simply wrong - or at least felt wrong, given the BDM player only hinted what he was about.
This is why I put emphasis on people not making up vague things like long range scans or reports from NPC stations or NPC patrols. The player simply does not know what happens when they are not present themselves. It makes it look metagamey. The idea of using the playerlist should be to find encounters and not to metagame.
