The core conciet of playing mildly ethical looser mercenaries as they blow folks away that are just barely less ethical then themselves, and are implicitely disposable assets for unstoppable megacorporations that will use you and throw you away. It never sat well with me.
So you don't like Cyberpunk then?
Also the ecophelia and the native american worship leaves a bad taste in my mouth, and the themes of magical discrimination get really tiresome.
I'll admit it: I liked it. It's fantasy nonsense ("in a game about dragons and elves!?!? gasp!"), but I remember in the novels (I read decades ago admittedly) white people getting cosmetic surgery to look Native, and a woman being sexually by a (literal) gang of Natives. I also seem to recall the NAN books making it clear that life in the NAN kinda' sucked. I also really liked the bit where humans stopped being racist towards one another, and instead focused on the orks and trolls (and ghouls and other HMHVV variants).
This has been maddening. As I try to figure out what makes me not like Shadowrun and like Huntdown. My only sorta clue is I feel Huntdown takes itself less seriously, and in that becomes more....believable?
Maybe?
Personally, I see default Shadowrun as a product of the Cyberpunk of the 80's that was itself written in the 90's. It's like revisiting something that you loved as a kid, but now think looks kinda' dated and dumb.
My advice to make Shadowrun more engaging? Ditch the tropes.
The Year is 20XX. Tech has advanced, magic exists, and your characters... live in the suburbs. Or out in the rural part of your country. And rather than take inspiration from Blade Runner and Johnny Mnemonic, you're going for Ozarks or Longmire. But with cyber and magic.
Instead of arcologies and skyscrapers and neon holograms at night, you have trees and sunshine and dirt roads. Buildings are seldom taller than two stories (and even three is pretty uncommon), everybody seems to know everybody, churches are much more common (depending on where you're at, they may be nearly everywhere), livestock and farms are things, and so on and so forth. If you've ever driven through (say) Arkansas, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Florida, ask yourself "how would this place look in Shadowrun?" If you think "boring", then what would make it interesting?
"A rigger? What's that? Well, the closest we got is the Jacobs kid who plays with his drones. He lives over by Old Snagglejaw's, the bar run by that ork who got set on fire fifteen years back in a brawl with Alamos 20,000. A shaman? You want Sharon Carpenter. She runs the animal shelter with her husband, and they sell purebreed Siberian mastiffs. A street samurai? No idea. A cyber soldier you mean? Shannon Park is the town sheriff, so I doubt she'll be up to whatever you want. But her daughter is pretty sick, and the bills are piling up, so maybe she'll be up to something if the money's good. But that's a big maybe. A 'fixer'? Nyah, I aint no fixer. I just like to keep up with what's going on and who's doing it. Now why are you here?
Attending Po' Boy's funeral huh? Never knew 'em, heard they were a good hacker though. But I bet that's why those Aztechnology suits have been sniffing around. Yeah, they came in over at Richards' landing strip a couple a days ago, got a hotel room down at the Riverside, and... hey! Where you going?"
tl;dr - Shadowrun: Dumas Arkansas might help fix things for you.