In my case, I was finishing up some code to pull the metadata for a pubkey. It was working in the repl with mine and a few other keys, but when I tried to test the fully wired code with my test keys, I wasn't getting the events. Turns out the relay I was testing against just didn't have that data.
Discussion
My point is that normally the only way to know whether a relay has a given event or not is by querying it.