Your experience significantly differs from mine. Sevilla used to pointedly ignore us on HF when we were inbound to Gib. One day after repeatedly trying to raise them we slipped in the call “ Sevilla Speedbird xyz at 55” We got an immediate response of “ Speedbird xyz, Sevilla?” When we then continued, “ Speedbird xyz relaying for Rafair 123...” comms failed again, go figure.
That reminds me of my time working in Jeddah FIR in the late 70s. Every morning there would be an ElAl flight Tel Aviv to Nairobi and it would go down the middle of the Red Sea. The flight would call up Jeddah and it was a circus watching the controllers studiously ignoring them, turning their backs on the controller's desk, noses in the air etc. Hilarious!
Around the same time, there used to be regular USAF SR71 flights down the Red Sea and nobody spoke, either pilot or controller. Kind of "if you don't mention it, it isn't there" but the radar faithfully plotted it's progress.