Design Paralysis & Fast Cars

With 65 minutes on the clock, I'm intending to keep up with my "minimum one blog a month" goal - And this time (as ever) getting a little personal ~ Lately I've been a bit quiet on the design front (not just due to smooching cute guys, a renewal of my Godzilla hyper-fixation and a recent addiction to Grand Archive), mostly because I've been stuck in a rut of what I like to call "design paralysis" - It's something like the opposite of writers block where instead of not knowing what to write, you have multiple paths you have written and you're not sure which to fully flesh out. Let's see an example:

In one version of my Mad Max-y car game, Rides (eg Cars) are handled super simply and cleanly using the following rules and character sheet:

This version was incredibly close to Duffy's original Hell's Highway with only minor additions and clarifications. Simple, easy, no grid. I ran this once and... wasn't fully satisfied. The cars felt like they needed a bit more juice, more stats. The same kind of juice I'd added to the boots on the ground. However one horrific question haunted this process like a wraith: "What determines who wins a race?" In Hell's Highway, it's the fiction + maybe a dice roll. This felt remarkably unsatisfying to me. So I plunged into research. I played Gaslands, I played Thunder Road: Vendetta, I played Forza: Horizon, I reflected on my love of Ghost Kart Racers and technically in this time played Mario Kart. I kept asking what a good Car Mechanic in a tabletop game would look like (and perhaps too late found Will Jobst's Torq which came to a lot of the same conclusions I'd taken months to forge). What was once a game that could be played in a car, evolved into something that required not just models but also a grid of a kind:

Forgive me Mothers of the FKR, for I have sinned...

With equally complex ride sheets to match:

Is it Phoenix Command? No. But it's certainly an added level of complexity that feels... maybe not quite in the spirit.

And that "maybe" is the origin of Design Paralysis.

See both of these methods work. In the right hands both of these methods are fun. In certain hands each of these methods are too simple or too complex respectively. There is no superior method.  It's simply a matter of what you want, or rather unfortunately it's a matter of what I the designer want to pursue. And let me tell you, as someone who is in therapy because a combination of Catholic Guilt and years spent as a service top have fried my ability to identify what I want, it's been grim. But kind of fulfilling in it's own way.

At a certain point I'll need to rip the band-aid, pick a path. At this point I'm fairly certain I'll go for the more complex one (or at the very least that's what I'll run my next one shot in, as the playtest that only involved racing in that system was a LOT of fun, so I'm eager to see how guns feel in the mix). But it's a type of paralysis that's stalled numerous projects of mine (including Inheritors) and I felt venting a bit about it in the brief hours I have remaining in the month might be helpful to me and others ~

What do you think? Which method appeals to you more? Is the second simply rules getting in the way or is it ideal scaffolding for interesting scenarios? Let me know! (Please, I'm really struggling here ;~; )