Most things I’m saying can be found in the Wikipedia page on the attack and the festival massacre (which, as Wikipedia generally does, leans Zionist so I’d recommend you read critically). If you want citations for something specific let me know.

The best I can think of might be that it just happened to be next to or somehow in the way of (along the path to) an actual military target

That was, in fact, the case. They were going to the city of Nevitot and the festival site was next to Re’im, which had the IDF Gaza division’s headquarters. On an operational level it was a good opportunity to take hostages, but for multiple reason, including the aforementioned laxness, it quickly devolved into what we now know as the Nova music festival massacre.

That is a degree of lax that seems to be almost nonsensical. The soldiers couldn’t hold their focus on the actual military targets and took down an entirely unrelated target instead.

The idea was to take hostages before heading to the intended operation site, but by the time they could get out of their (they engaged with the IDF in the festival site, as you probably know) the IDF was already headed their way so they retreated. Still fucked up, but from what I understand it seemed like they could do it without compromising their initial objective at the time.

Plausible and will give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that’s right, but would appreciate a citation or reference.

We don’t have their plans either way, so this is just my general read of the information that was reported on during the early months of the war. The nature of the kibbutz on or near the border makes them natural spots for IDF sites. Go through the engagements table in the main article and you’ll find a lot of instances of X kibbutz and right after X outpost/military base/etc. Note that it appears that there are places they entered exclusively to take hostages, and I wasn’t counting those when I said targets as the hostages were meant to be tools for the negotiations after the attack and not themselves the targets of the attack.

Why don’t you agree?

I consider it a “don’t blame the player, blame the game” situation. Israel created a situation where taking hostages is one of the few ways Hamas can do literally anything, including in this case (as far as the drawing board went) taking back Palestinian detainees and not get bombed to oblivion. To put it another way, Israel takes hostages (also known as detainees) all the time and you can’t free them without something to trade. and that something was hostages in this case. I view it as a realpolitik military/political decision that nonetheless doesn’t give them an excuse to not treat them with respect and at least try to keep civilian casualties to a minimum. You might say that the hostages didn’t really help (other than free a few detainees), and in hindsight you’d be right but nobody could predict the perfect storm of Netanyahu’s desperation for a forever war to keep him in power and the until-then-unknown insanity of Biden’s Zionism.

Gotcha. In that case, I retract my previous statement on the basis of new evidence. (Again, would appreciate a link to said article or a similar one, if you can find it.)

https://www.axios.com/2024/10/19/netanyahu-house-hit-hezbollah-drone

Note that this is the only article that explicitly states that the drone both hit and was fired by Hezbollah, so it could be a mistake on their part but I personally don’t think so.