100% agree, and also, bonus points for acknowledging there are games that are too constrained.
The beauty of AW, and its Good Hacks (e.g. Sagas of the Icelanders, which encapsulates this perfectly), to me is the same as the beauty of certain types of euro-games: there are few choices to make, but every time you make a choice it’s
a) difficult
b) thematic
c) game-tilting
I’m coming to realize that this is my aesthetic choice in most, if not all, games. I love open-world sandbox games in theory, whether video games or RPGs or civilization-building board games with thousands of cardboard chits, but in practice I only have so much patience for games where only 1-10% of my decisions have a meaningful impact on my post-playthrough narrative. And my least favourite type of game, while I respect the form itself to death, is the visual novel where your decisions are all about characterization and only matter to your internal headcanon.
(that’s not entirely true – my very least favourite type of game is the one that pretends to give you agency but actually just handwave or funnel your decisions in the same way a visual novel does, while trying to distract you with another game, usually one in which you have to kill hordes of bad guys with twitch-skills or math)
AW and assorted Good Hacks walk this line perfectly for me. Don’t make me engage with a system when the choice and/or outcome is obvious, or doesn’t fit the narrative themes, or doesn’t notably change the state of the game. And given the core rule of AW – “to do it, do it”, and the reciprocal relationship between “clouds and boxes” – that also means that when I wish to tilt the state of the game for my own out-of-game reasons, I’ll have to do narrative positioning, make difficult choices, and be thematic about it. That feedback loop is entirely missing in the few “Bad Hacks” I’ve played.