I think you could have leadership over a gang, while being the power behind the throne of a hardholder...

There are a number of ways of dropping to four stats, in my experience.  Remember that if you're going to make something a stat, you're asserting that that quality is going to have a very specific place in your game.

--It has to govern something important and commonplace enough that it's worth the space of your sheet and having a low number is a real handicap.

--It has to govern something limited and specific enough that other stats still get used and you can't get by on it alone. 

--It has to govern something that it is okay for characters to be very good or very bad at.

So let's look at the Apocalypse World stats. 

Cool is an interesting stat because it doesn't represent a specific field of endeavor, but is kind of a catchall for things which aren't explicitly covered by another stat. As such, there are a couple of ways you could get rid of it.

--Act Under Fire is always 50/50.  Basically, everyone has Cool 0. 
--Everything is governed by a stat.  When you Act Under Fire, the MC determines the category the fire comes from and you roll that.  Suppose that your stats were something like "Assassin, Spy, Saboteur, Cultist."  If you were acting under literal fire to make your escape, you would roll Assassin.  If you were acting under fire to resist manipulation, you would roll Spy.  If you were acting under fire to repair your plane's engine before it crashed, you would roll Saboteur. 

Weird can only exist as a stat if the magic level stays very near what Apocalypse world has.  Either more or less magic means no Weird.

--In a "mundane" setting, you could simply strip out Weird and run on Cool/Hard/Sharp/Weird. 
--In a more magical setting, Weird gets split up.  You could run a Potter game where the stats were Charms, Potions, Dark Arts, and Courage

Hot assumes that the same characters are good in all social situations.

--If socializing is very important to your game, you could make every stat social.  Roll with, say, "Street, Suit, Uniform, Fashion."  Each stat makes you good at talking to people who dress that way *and* doing things you'd expect people dressed that way to do.  So to build a computer, you roll Suit and to shoot a dude in the face, you roll Uniform. 
--If it's not important, you could do the same thing.  (Every NPC is either cool, hard, sharp, or weird.  Roll the appropriate stat to manipulate them).  Or, just let Cool absorb Hot's functions entirely. 

SharpGives some--and only some--characters the right to ask questions. 

--If you don't like the questions mechanic, just axe the stat.
--If you want everyone in on the action, let each stat provide information about related topics.

Finally, Hard assumes that some characters can be bad at fighting, and how you fight doesn't matter.  If you were designing a game about soldiers or ninjas or martial arts masters or something, you wouldn't want "hard."  You'd want each stat to be associated with a fighting style.

For a fantasy adventure game your stats are Bushido, Ninjutsu, Maho, and Ki.  Each one can be used to seize things by force, but they provide different side benefits. 

This was a move my MC introduced last game, which my psycho Angel used to great effect.

When you get high with the Children of Chrome, roll +cool

on a 10+ you get +1 ongoing to Weird rolls for the rest of the scene. 
on a 7-9, same, but you get -1 ongoing to everything else until you sleep
on a 6 or lower, I'll tell you what happens, and I promise you're not going to like it.

(The Children of Chrome were the followers of the Hocus, who was terrified of me but needed my med skills.  I didn't much care for them, but ended up needing every edge I could get. I started with Visions of Death and Infirmary, then picked up Healing Touch and lost, and later changed to a brainer with In-Brain puppet strings.

Basically, I summoned people to my lab, tied them down and gave them orders.  I was eventually going to set up a shack in the barrens and become a sort of norn or fate.  When the game ended, I had just transplanted a ghost and was gearing up to duel some druids.)   

This is a really neat idea.  Looking at the revised version, it can still be streamlined. 

Receivers: Why specify that they have to roll to ride an antenna?  A Chopper has to roll to quell resistance in his gang, not just to give an order.  Adding dice rolls just to let the character use his basic ability seems like it slows things down. 

Also, this business of reducing Hx one point at a time is gonna get boring for the other players.  And give them experience.  I also don't understand why he permanently gets less familiar in his own body, every time he leaves it.  Why not try "when you are riding the airwaves, all other players treat their Hx with you as 0"?

Ride the Airwaves is good, but tracking the ongoings seems unnecessary.  Why not something like "you can only ride one person at once" or "if you are riding 2 or mroe people, your body is unconscious" ?

Static, Remote Viewing, and Cloudsourcing are perfect.  Cloudsourcing especially is a fucking jewel of a move. 

Medium is the Message is a really promising idea.  I'm not sure about +1forward.  It doesn't affect NPCs at all, and it doesn't give PCs an actual incentive to *do* what you want.  Giving an XP bubble might be more interesting, although you might need to make the move a little harder to use. 

Surely it needn't always work that way: "when you speak the truth to a crowd" would include speaking the crowd's truth, but it should also apply when speaking a personal truth, one with no connection or relevance to what they thought their lvies were about.

A Hocus is a fucking wacknut--and that should come with the charisma to impose his personal vision on society.   

Yeah, Brainers can't get no satisfaction.  Just take a look at their sex move: automatically use deep brain scan on anyone you sleep with.

Thing ins, you don't automatically *succeed*--and a missed brain scan inflcits 1-harm ap.  No wonder brainers are lonely. 

I'd err on the side of generality with impulses.  Why use "craves sexual pleasure" when you could use "craves attention" or "craves connection"?  Similarly, Sloth might be punchier as Impulse: craves easy and comfort.

Just my take, of course. 

Mike,

Considering that anyone can get 2 moves from another playbook, I really don't see the point in rolling up that character as a Brainer.  If you're never taking any further Brainer moves, I imagine you're jumping ship to another career ASAP.  So you take 2 moves form other playbooks, then... what?  Moonlighting and +2 Hard?  Why not just start out in whatever playbook you would be taking moves from and take the necessary brainer moves from there? 

An angel with one advance can have +3 Sharp and Sixth Sense, which duplicates the trick.

A starting driver with Weather Eye has +2 on those rolls, plus all the awesome driving. 

A hocus can start with Wacknut and take Receptivity as his first advance. 

The bottom line is, the intuitive psychic concept is great for AW, but not for the brainer playbook.