Yeah, that first part is a legit observation. Kind of the classic story telling system RPG problem and despite its many awesomely elegant mechanics not one that TOR managed to solve. Pendragon and Edge of the Empire both have that same friction where the character sheet has all these wonderful personal motivators but the game takes so much effort to prep properly that in the interest of time and sanity you fall back on published stuff…which then often drops the ball on all the cool character sheet stuff. My group was willing to give a pass on that but for your tastes I’d probably recommending kitbashing the parts from the published adventures (locations and NPCs and such) as part of your own character focused prep but not actually “running them” per se.

Interestingly part of my current attraction with MYZ is the effort to reduce prep time so that one can play a traditional mechanic game that’s character focused and not have to rely on published stuff.

That’s also the appeal of Cypher System / Numenara that we talked about recently. It’s a less traditional game mechanically, but very traditional in terms of GM/player dynamics and its specifically engineered (haven’t played to say how successful it is) for low prep GMing. Like most creatures IIRC are ton of color and like one stat.