I am more than happy to be an inspiration. I bought Lawmen to steal all your best ideas and see how it runs, but I still haven’t had a chance to run the system yet, so take anything I say with a large grain of salt! I am also really interested as I’ve never gotten to discuss game design like this with anyone before. I have one other friend who is really into design but not talking about it too much - everyone has their own methods.
Shadowrun is a setting I plan to appreciate as far away from its system as possible! But I skimmed over the Android board game (also a big fan of board games) but haven’t seen this one before. Looks on the more abstract side like you are explaining.
Probably the first question is if Crit failures are interesting - they sound like they may slow the story. I’d want to try it in a playtest but I love those Powered by the Apocalypse misses where even as PCs fail, the story moves forward in new and interesting ways (that are awful for the PCs!). Usually there is some kind of escalating punishment where a red herring causes some trouble - entangling a powerful faction, a PC gets captured and others like you were mentioning. I personally love a list as a GM - improv does well with something solid to crystallize around.
I really like getting bonus information on more leads! Maybe even the player gets to ask a question to give them some more agency. Or from a list of questions to make the improv less intense - What defenses they have, what allies do they have, what are some more entrances to their base, who else is hunting them, etc.
I definitely prefer the complication on not enough leads as well. I would hit them with especially hard trouble like they find their target in the worst possible way - they are being ambushed, fall into a trap, the law enforcement is corrupt here and is on their side.
What were you thinking of as far as time pressure goes? You thinking similar with the Clock or something else in mind?
I am going to skim Monster of the Week this week to see how it does investigation. Its more Monster Hunting to discover weaknesses but it seems interesting to more narratively explore investigation instead of simulating searching for clues which lead to other locations.