These are some interesting insights, although I'm not sure I agree.

I think this is buy in.
When I bought Shadowrun, read its rules, despaired at them, read them again, played and slowly got the grips of them I was already in too deep.

While I could see this being a factor for newer players, the level of intense year over year contribution instead suggests that the community is very passionate about the game. There are tons of contributors who produce content for and about the game for years. Some of it is pretty great!

I was very close to throwing The Sprawl out with my current campaign, because I didn't like it at all – the last session somewhat fixed it, I'm still conflicted though.

Ugh. I despise the pre-made missions for this game. I hate the way they are organized and use them ONLY for inspiration to write my own stories. Unlike DnD, you cannot GM straight from this source material. You have to prepare. The elements are there, but it takes an experienced GM to make short work of it and frankly, I like my stories to have clearer arcs that link mission to mission.

If the system is broken and needs hours of writing homebrew stuff to fix it, why play it in the first place? Play something different, save yourself the time.

I hope you don't take this as an attack, because I say this without judgement at all, but I think this comes down to experience. GMs with less experience in general are going to struggle with this a lot more. GMs with a lot of experience should feel more comfortable adjusting difficulty and rule complexity on the fly. Generally speaking, if a rule comes up during game and a player advocates for it on the spot saying something like, "p254 says I can roll this and this," I'll either respond that it will work that way for the bad guys too, are you sure? Or I'll say, "Okay, that doesn't make sense to me. We'll play it this way for the rest of this session and then in the break before next game, I'll clearly define a better house rule." To be honest, I have very few of these. Like maybe 3. I tend to just straight up ignore several rules and tables in an effort to make the game a little more simple.

My next post will be about problems I have with the game and I bet you'll see some things there you can relate to, but once again, reading your link, there's a lot to unpack there. I'll put a comment on it directly. Thanks for following my series here!