For those who choose it as a vocation, shadowrunning isn't about overthrowing the megacorps, it's about carving out as free a life for yourself as you can before the inevitable end -- maybe, at best, enjoying the chaos that would come from being able to somehow set corp against corp ("chaos is a ladder," as Petyr Littlefinger said).
And Shadowruns biggest problem is that it makes it look glamerous, and then saddles you with the paperwork instead. In both mechanical and lore-terms.
In Huntdown you play bounty hunters.
The very introduction of the game makes it clear that its people trying to live by their own rules. Not joining the gangs or the corpos. But throught the game, you work freelance for a corpo, hunting down gangs making trouble, and even turning down lucrative offers from your targets. And while the gangs are evil, the hunters themselves are bloodthirsty sociopaths, and there is little to show the corpos to be anything but corrupt and ruthless.
Spoilers:At the end of the game, your stiffed of your money by the same corpo you where working for, and a bounty is put on YOUR head. And then even your employer is also axed off for being a loose end!
But the critical, CRITICAL difference, is that Huntdown makes it all super cool, with a large amount of black humor, and doesn't like to hear itself talk. It gives JUST enough information for the basics of a fleshed out world, but focuses on being cool and YOU being cool, not the setting wanking itself off with tons of minutia. Things in the setting focus on being really imagination catching, and cool to be in, even in a relatively toned down way.
True, although the flip side of that is that the more rigorously the consequences of the PCs' actions from cool hooks/locations Set A are followed -- especially if they are epic and setting-changing -- the less likely the cool hooks/locations from Sets B and C are going to be available.
Except thats the issue: the hooks SUCK, and the locations BLOW. Linear adventures can at least offer the promises of really powerful set pieces that free-structured adventures can't provide. But Shadowrun doesn't even trust the players with that.
Its idea of a 'Adventure', is you MAYBE being a bodyguard to the REAL movers and shakers, and just observe as they do stuff. The PCs are there just to stand around and see stuff unfold, maybe shoot a bloke every once in a while. Even as linear storytelling material, that is WANK.
And I don't believe that Shadowrun really wants to be about cynicism and you loosing all the time. In its videogames, its literature, its always an exceptional crew making a large difference. Saving the world once. But thats because they just have self contained villians to be defeated. And thats the stuff people walk away with the most pleasing memories of and compliments of.
And I wouldnt demand that. You don't need to save the world, or a city, in order to make RPG play meaningful. The general writers for Shadowrun just suck, and have sucked from the very start.