As someone who's A Fan Of PbtA Games: yeah, there's nothing exactly wrong with your analysis of TSL, or PbtA games in general. PbtA as an engine has attracted an audience of gamers & designers who A) already have a sense of the kind of genre-first, static-ish-character story they want to tell and B) are looking for tools that help them maintain that story & guide their improv to stay in-genre. What this means is that you get a lot of mechanization of aesthetic such that yeah, it matters that you have quippy moves about doing quippy things. The goal of a PbtA system isn't to inform players about how to act, it's about giving positive reinforcement for staying on-theme.
I think it helps to understand that PbtA games (and, to some extent, games in that lineage like BitD) are generally built for people w/ a very particular understanding of narrative. To be an academic for a moment, Hiroki Azuma in Otaku: Japan's Database Animals called it the "database model" of consuming media. In short, the database model atomizes media down to its component parts – first to the individual characters, setpieces, and events, then further into the individual tropes or mannerisms. Think like TVTropes or fan wikis. For PbtA gamers, it usually doesn't matter who you are as a player character. What matters is, what kind of story are you going to tell? What's the genre, what tropes are you applying? Thus, it's no wonder that the player agenda, the political principles of the designers, all the romance mechanics, etc are all frontloaded before the character info. That's the stuff that tells a PbtA gamer, "Is this game for you?"
I think TSL is, in some ways, this kind of game design ideology at its purest. I know April's mentioned elsewhere that she was surprised people wanted settings for the game – for her, that was the easy part, because all you really have to do is throw some evocative background down and you can be on your way. I do think TSL suffers most from the TTRPG rulebook practice of implying narrative instead of handing readers narrative, because if you aren't already on board with its genre it can be hard to figure out a narrative that fits the mechanics.
Somewhere in here is also a discussion about how like, FitD systems kept the player solipsism & partial successes of PbtA but gave players more explicit verbs that they can actively choose from instead of PbtA's "tell a story until you hit a trigger" approach, and maybe a comparison between TSL and Dungeon Bitches (a more grungy & explicit pro-horny game that also feels like an overenthusiastic punk lesbian trying to invite sex-averse ace folks to an orgy), but like, I dunno if that's actually productive here, comment if you want that ramble I guess. Something something check out Crucible of Aether by @Jackie-Tries-Internet.
