Could dark energy just be another characteristic of the gravitational force?

From my understanding the strong force becomes "repulsive" due to the Pauli Principle. The areas of repulsion are just where the principle happens to overrule the strong force. I don't believe the sign of the force itself changes.

That being said, and someone could correct me if i'm wrong, i don't think the effects of the principle are enough to cause the expansion let alone the acceleration of the expansion of the universe.

In a sense, yes.

Around the time of Newton, a contemporary of his, Fatio de Duillard, wrote about the effects of abberation of gravity or in simpler terms, what would happen if gravity traveled at a finite speed. This idea was studied by le Sage and later LaPlace who was trying to prove the stability of orbits so he had to address this theory which would predict some kind of "extra" force that would, well, expand things like galaxies and really anything that orbits (think accelerated expansion of the universe). Since we "knew" at the time (any time up until 1998) that the universe's expansion was not accelerating, and that orbits were stable, we also "knew" that gravity must travel infinitely fast. By the way that "proof" is still on Wikipedia.

Now that we know about the expansion of the universe, upon re-examining this discredited "shadow theory", this extra force which was once called impossible should be considered to be dark energy created by the lag in gravity between orbiting objects. After all, if gravity travelled at about 400 kps, or about 1/765 the speed of light, dark energy is created in the amounts seen by nasa or about %68 of the total gravity. There is a geometric proof of this in the paper Gravitas, Part One.