The middle ground I'd go for is having the players have visibility of clocks for factions they're interacting with regularly, while keeping others mostly hidden. That allows the focus to remain on the emergent story, rather than pulling focus away from it just because some other faction they've never been involved with is about to accomplish something that they've had no prior concern over. It also allows for there to be an investigative aspect, with the crew looking into factions they take an interest in (or who've taken an interest in them) to find out what their goals are.
In the FitD game I've been wrapping up, one of the PCs is a spy/evangelizer for a foreign power, and fancies himself a behind-the-scenes manipulator. By having all of our faction clocks in the open—the majority of which other players ignore—the guy playing the spy has been able to use downtime actions to advance or roll back clocks for factions he's never met, and influence events in ways that are super interesting, and that have shaped the whole campaign in surprising ways. We've talked about it a lot, and we feel like it's the first time that sort of PC has felt meaningful and "right"—in most RPGs, the conniving manipulator type just talks about being that guy. Here, he gets to actually set factions against each other, align or time the group's plans with those conflicts, etc. It's great!
Almost none of that would be possible if that PC had to meet every faction before seeing their clock progress. Most FitD games have a lot of factions. You'd have to spend every mission and every downtime touring the entire setting to link up with all of them. Instead, player-facing faction clocks do something much more elegant—if a PC decides to do something about a clock, such as using a downtime action, paying a friend or contact to intervene, or planning a score/mission/etc. related to it, that means they heard about what the faction is doing. That's it. You have a limited number of downtime actions, resources, and sessions across a typical FitD campaign, so even if it seems like you're getting something for free by knowing what a faction is doing, it's the doing something about it that matters.
But you can also tweak a player-facing clock, to get some of what you're after, without hiding the clock. I usually have one or two factions whose clocks, at some point, are more like (from my last campaign) "Complete Phase 2" or (from my current one) "Perfect Transformation Matrix: 4/6" Since the players know the factions in question are scary, possibly people they expect to go up against, they can decide whether they want to read those clocks as a general progression toward something mysterious (and mounting dread/tension), or do an info gathering roll or similar to dig deeper, or just shrug and say "Not my problem."
Last thing, as far as looking into a faction to find out their goals, the fact that FitD factions usually have their goal right there in the open, as a one-sentence summary, is imo really effective. FitD isn't really about setting tourism and almost never about that sort of investigation. Every roll and resource spend should be a meaningful decision. So poking around in the dark, hoping you uncover something, and that the downtime action you used is as useful as the PC who spent theirs just training for XP, is kind of against the system's principles. You can still do something like investigation, but it's more to-the-point and often more player-directed. In the game I'm running now, there's an optional rule where you can spend a downtime action advancing a clock to gather info about something specific. But here's the cool part: You aren't working toward an answer from the GM. You're
establishing a fact about the setting. Before you start the clock you tell the GM what you want to establish, and they decide how many ticks it will take, whether it might take multiple clocks, etc., based on the magnitude or whatever of the fact. So what looks, in-game, like your PC investigating something, is really a shared-authority mechanic. It's been great for us, and one of the more emergent-gameplay-pushing mechanics I've ever seen. I wish every FitD game had it!
