I am what you might call a career GM of 25 years.
I rarely play and prefer the GM seat if I’m honest. I have a strong preference for sandbox games and run almost everything in GURPS. I love good stories but I don’t play RPGs to tell stories…
To my mind putting together an awesome game is like putting together a random story generator. What you’re trying to do is set things up to maximise the potential for generating awesome stories instead of crappy ones… but it’s “cheating” if you ever directly edit the story.
In this story generator, the GM is playing the world and it’s his job to make an interesting world filled with interesting people and interesting events. The players play the protagonists, it’s their job to make interesting characters and make the rest of the table give a damn about those characters and what happens to them. The system is the physics of the setting...
And if everyone does their jobs well an awesome story will be generated as all these elements interact.