OK, I don't know why I was being weird and vague, I guess I was paranoid someone from my group would read it but who cares, their loss if they don't heed the warning.

So I think part of my mental block is that I am struggling with the dark future vs adventure hook thing. So the object of desire is a flower imbued with some of the maelstrom that is valued as a drug but also has potential to combat some of the decaying effects that are taking place because of the maelstrom's hunger. The apocalypse is primarily environmental caused by a slow leeching of life force by the maelstrom. The players don't know all of the potential yet. So the first session Cuba and his gang came after the bus with the intent of getting this Lotus.

I have Cuba as a front that expresses ambition because he is actually being manipulated by his brainer Filter who knows about the potential of the Lotus but has told him just to get it so he can reverse engineer the drug capabilities. The dark future is Filter getting in kahoots with the maelstrom and starting a new nexus of decay in the players' back yard.

The problem is that the session ended with the gang surrounding the bus after blowing out a couple of tires and the rest of the characters finding out about the flower but there doesn't seem to be any way that this is gonna end because the skinner with the flower is best friends with the gunlugger who is going to do his best to mow through the whole gang with the help of some bus mounted machine guns. Should an entire front be so easily stopped? Should so much time be dedicated to a standoff in the desert?
 
The other front I devised is from the Driver's past. Chin and his gang got screwed over by Tex (the Driver) and his partner the savvyhead Jebadyah. I have this front express fear because Tex is on the run from Chin and Chin is afraid of the people he ended up screwing over. They were supposed to do some kinda gig that would benefit the Black Bark cult who are also trying to get into kahootz with the maelstrom but maybe for a different reason than Filter. None of this has come to light yet since we have been dealing with the first front. So I had the dark future as killing off the characters but is it really more like super-charging the maelstrom with some tech-powered cult rituals? Maybe they will end up trying to get their hands on the Lotus too. Maybe Jebadayah will try to do some reverse engineering of the Lotus or maybe he will think he can do more if he joins the Black Bark cult.

There is also a front that is different Maelstrom landscapes and an affliction:delusion to eat the Lotus that expresses decay. So all of these tie into the lotus and I worry that maybe it is too focused on this one object (there are other Lotuses though).

The last front I devised is a hold that they reach where an affliction:custom is to send off members of the hold by lottery to the neighboring hive queen's hold where they are forced to breed with her mutant children and finally eaten. This front expresses despair. The dark future is the characters are captured and eaten by the mutants.

So I have the fronts. Have I planned them out too far in advance? Did I plan the wrong things? Things were kinda awkward at the start when it was just a bus full of characters and the Hocus' cult. I tried to propel some interactions but it is like everyone was up in everybody else's business. The players said they liked it when the gang showed up and there has been some good PC conflicts but I feel like I am doing something wrong like I can't zoom out as far as I would like to and the world just feels a little too confined right now.

I guess that is a lot of information. I don't really expect answers, these are just the questions I am asking myself now that I actually ran a session.