Now, here's a radical thought for why the Reapers didn't want to hoof it from Dark Space: because, individually, they can't.
Whoa, I'm hearing. That's stupid. We see Reapers over Earth.
Yes. We do. But we have nothing to suggest we see all the Reapers over Earth. Or that all the Reapers even reached the galaxy. It's quite possible, given the distances involved, that individually Reapers can't get from Dark Space to the Galaxy and remain combat effective. We've known from Vigil's hypothesis in ME1, and from Grayson's struggle in Retribution, that the Reapers are not omnipotent in energy production. They may well not have the juice to all make the trip quickly, if at all, or in good order and combat power.
So how do they still get here? There's an old analogy for it: the crossing the desert problem.
Water is one of the most important things to have when crossing the desert, but it's incredibly hard, if not impossible, to carry all you need, you'd need more water than you can carry. Say you need five days worth of water, but you, personally, can only carry three days.
In the classic math problem, the key is storing and stockpiling. Load up on water, go out into the desert one day, deposit one day's worth of water, and return. Refil. Do again. Gradually build a stockpile large enough one day out so that you can start moving water and stockpiling two days out. Et. cetera. It's the classic logistics problem.
In this analogy, the Reapers are the travelers, and but they can't restock on water (super-FTL-fuel/energy that will get them to the Milky Way galaxy in relevant time).
On the other hand, rather than just dying if they run out of water, they hang in Dark Space, genuinely trapped for the relevant amount of time: whether they can never re-charge the type/scale of energy on their own (and so have to wait for anyone to return to them) or whether it would simply take them too long to do so (say, years or decades too late), is irrelevant, so long as they are unable to move forward in a timely manner. They use up their fuel, they can't get enough energy to matter.
So how does a fleet of Reapers, none of whom can make it across the void to the galaxy, make it across? Transfering energy amongst themselves.
Take it by the hypothetical unit of five. Five Reapers of similar type/range/whatever go a fifth of their range and stop. One Reaper gives its remaining four-fifths of energy to the other four, recharging them to full, and is left behind to hang in dark space until they return,victorious, with energy/the Reaper at last can recharge its own energy supplies (a process we don't have to agree takes forever, but takes too long by the Reapers calculations).
Then those four Reapers move until they go a fourth of their reserves, and the same sort of re-allocation of fuel/energy is done. Then the three Reapers go a third. Then the two reapers go a half.
In the end, one Reaper out of the initial five made it, but it made it, it's ready to totally kick ass, and there's far more than five Reapers to start the trip, and enough make it to still have a damn good shot at winning against the galaxy (if they play their cards right).
And tadah. A classic mathematical modeling and justification for why the Reapers had good reason to want the Citadel Relay (but didn't necessarily need it), how they could get to the Galaxy (without the Galaxy being unbelievably close), and why the Reapers won't just be too numerous to oppose (because a lot/most of them had to be stuck in Dark Space in order for the rest to get here). Exact fractions and proportions are up for change, but it's the model, not the exact ratios, that is important.
Can I claim this is The Absolute Word? No. But it's a reasonable explanation given what we have, it works with known limitations and behavioral preferences of the Reapers, it provides plausibility looking forward to what we must be able to do, and resolves a lot of questions we have in an acceptable in-universe reasoning.
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