That's a perhaps over-long way of saying that my top tip would be (i) work with the players to help them make "laden" PCs, and then (ii) latch onto the hooks those PCs are laden with. And conversely, I think the easiest way to get crappy situation is to come up with it independently of the PCs, and to have the whole thing be driven by We have to do the fetch quest because that's what the GM is serving up.
This is helpful. As I looked over your specifics from other games systems, I see that my approach is actually quite similar, though I hadn't distilled it down to its essence. The main system I've GMed for the past 20 years has been GURPS, which provides tons of story hooks on the character sheet. I usually focus on disadvantages and quirks, but skills and advantages come into play too. As a player, I love it when a GM picks up on a relatively minor skill and gives it center stage; I invest points in those skills because I hope they'll be relevant someday.
My first time GMing GURPS, back in the early '90s, I didn't have a good sense of this and wrote an adventure that had nothing to do with the specific PCs. The PCs were wonderfully rich, but I think the players were all so drunk on the flexibility of the chargen process that nobody considered why the characters might want to be together and why they might go on adventures. (I didn't have any session zero conversations back then.) The first few sessions were painful, to say the least, and I was personally mortified since I considered myself to be a veteran to TRPGs and I couldn't figure out why everything was going so horribly wrong.
Thinking back, I can see how that experience fits, to some degree, with the premise of this thread. At the time, my approach to "fix" things was to work harder on the adventure: better monsters, better NPCs, more backstory, richer cultural elements, snazzy handouts, deep research into the literary foundations of the campaign (the
Arabian Nights), etc. I poured my heart and soul into it. All this work wasn't entirely wasted, but it didn't get to the root of the problem. I finally had a big OOC conversation with the full group. I found out what the players were excited about and what they found dull. I found out where there were disconnects between what a player wanted and what their character sheet said. We revised characters together (even retired and replaced a few), adjusted backstories, and made sure there were some ties between characters. For my part, I tied the story directly to them and made sure that every session would have direct hooks to one or more PCs. At that point, all the prep work began to pay off and it grew into an immensely satisfying 10+ year campaign.
