The premise wasn't a sandbox, and play has GM presented goals, but everybody is onboard. Before we go off on any tangents or kind of narrowed down choice areas, I ensure it's the players making that decision with some awareness that they're giving themselves into my hands at that point.
I should note that with this group when I did a Session Minus One with them, I gave them a questionnaire about their gaming preferences and experience and one of the questions I gave then was choose what playstyle they wanted - an open world where they make their own stories or a linear adventure path where the GM present scenarios for them to investigate, and the whole group indicated preference for linear adventures with GM developed plots. None of them wanted anything like a sandbox.
The current Star Wars campaign came out of a second attempt to run CoC for them that I felt was failing (the first game had ended in a TPK in under 10 sessions but I blamed it mostly on the scenarios at the time) because I had decided they really aren't a CoC group and they aren't enough into horror, intrapersonal roleplay and to some extent investigation to make it work. I offered some alternatives that I thought I could run online, and at the time The Mandalorian was the new hotness (I think season two had dropped pretty recently before that) and they agreed upon a Star Wars bounty hunter campaign which I agreed to if I could set it in a different time period than The Mandalorian.
So its not like I'm imposing this structure on anyone. The group as a whole is extremely intelligent but they also tend toward decision paralysis if presented too many clues or not clear enough breadcrumb trail to follow. IMO as a GM, the biggest problem I have had is my desire for realism leads me to not want to leave bread crumb trails so obvious that it's not clear why a bounty hunter would be needed under the rule that the NPCs have to not be utterly incompetent. But this leaves them in investigation modes where they get stuck unable to make a choice or else start speculating too much in the absence of information, slowing the pace down. I dislike it, but it's not clear to me exactly how to avoid it without railroading using heavy handed time skip and scene cutting techniques (basically telling them what they did off screen to track down the bounty).
If I were to get to true open world play where they could do anything they wanted, I strongly suspect the campaign would slow to a crawl as they debated with each other what they wanted to do or what they should do.
And before I get the usual response from the usual suspects that this is all because I'm a bad GM, I have conclusive evidence that the decision paralysis problem is particular to this group and not this GM or this campaign, because in the case of the Bounty Hunter campaign I have ran the first adventure for two groups and the other group charged head first into problems, often landing in over their head but always keeping forward momentum.
