All this has taken me back to Cortex Prime and playing with the various toolkit bits for different games. A nice addition with the DTRPG version of CP is the Cortex Codex, which is basically a list of the common terms and tools (Attributes, Doom Pool, etc.) for reference and also so that your reference document doesn't have to be the 200Mb CP pdf, which is a lot.
And this reminds me inevitably about what I think doesn't work about CP, which is the dice balance issue and feel. You basically try and gather an appropriate handful of dice (say Attribute, Skill, Distinction, Ability) and get a decent result. Differences in levels of those stats don't feel very meaningful - you're rolling d6, d8, d8, d6, for example, which doesn't feel very different from d6, d8, d8, d10 for another combination - and it's hard to tell that you're actually better at one thing than another. And the number of dice matters - if you're only rolling Attribute + Distinction that is very different from rolling 4 or 5 stats, it's much more swingy. But if you have a lot of dice, they can all feel pretty samey. Does that make sense to anyone else?
The good bit about the system is what the dice are and how you choose them - that's what feels like agency. So in Smallville, you've got Drives and Relationships as your main stats. While it's tempting to choose your best stats (Glory d10, Lois Hates Me d10) you usually don't because they're not appropriate and they don't feel right. So you decide you're actually really motivated by Justice d8 and Clark is A Whiny @$$Hole d8 on this roll, which feels like a meaningful choice (even if it is less so on the dice expectation, as it were).
It's an interesting balance, but what it says to me is that you have to be pretty careful in choosing which stats to bring into your game. It's better if each stat choice feels meaningful, important to the character, important to the situation. That's what gives the feeling of choice and agency, and engages the players. So actually, Attributes and Skills are pretty boring - you are clearly directed to choose what's appropriate (Dexterity + Fix) rather than decide what matters to you in this conflict (Drive + Relationship). Similarly, Affiliation is as boring as hell - the situation decides whether you're alone or whether you've got your team with you, not you.
