Your intuition is spot on.

But allow me to provide some contexts, should you find it useful.

The origin of futures is traditionally traced back to the Japanese rice exchange in XVII century and it's just a tool to solve a very important problem for producers: prices are cyclical and volatile, but they want to secure a predictable price for their produce. So they can sell contracts for delivering produce (that may not have even been sown yet) in the future (harvest), at a price determined now. (Of course, the buyer effectively takes over the cost of carry, plus risk of price change, which is why they charge a premium.)

The price of a future is a fairly straightforward thing - it all revolves around the premium over spot (sometimes under). And with the math tools at the time, you could even calculate things like an annual yield, therefore "inventing" a yield curve for futures.

Options are a seemingly simple evolution - you add an optionality to exercise the contract, so the buyer can back out of a deal that went poorly over time. Simple as it sounds, it immensely complicates the math behind pricing such an instrument.

So while options existed for some time earlier, they were not widely traded because noone knew how to price them accurately. It took a whole new heavyweight branch of mathematics to develop in the 20th century, culminating with work of Black, Scholes and Merton in the 70s, particularly the "dreaded formula", a nasty solution to a nasty stochastic partial differential equation. But that's okay, we had computers at that time, and the market exploded.

After this unnecessary exposition, back to your question.

Futures and options have now become the building blocks in the language of financial engineering which indeed allow you to make simple and complex utterances in the market, such as:

These utterances may be business-driven (you have a structure of future flows and liabilities that you want to balance with some objective in mind) or purely speculative. But everyone brings their own particular set of needs (long this, short that) to a single marketplace and a single number emerges.