it sounds like you had a couple, two-three of those A-ha! moments that seem to accompany MCing Apocalypse World :)
two of my PCs are pretty passive, and that's proved pretty frustrating for me. they're getting better about it, but our town's NPCs "reflect" this: they have stuff of their own going on that doesn't involve the PCs, on account of how i didn't know about pc-npc-pc triangles yet when we started, and couldn't figure a way to get them involved anyhow.
what seems to have worked is: violence.
even the most passive, easygoing Angel will react if someone waves a gun in hir face. that's what happened in our game (but it followed from the fiction, too).
as for the issue of Going Aggro?, there's this flowchart floating around the webs that seems to be useful:
https://docs.google.com/drawings/d/1ETp72rzwzNhfGEb-yKj2buZlrZ3zfQqUnHStoNCDRBQ/edit?pli=1in my game, we basically do it like this:
- are you going to be willing to back up your threats with actual violence, but the NPC can't fight back? that's Going Aggro.
- are you just holding a gun for show? like, if they spit in your eye, will you just get mad instead of blowing out their kneecaps? that's Seduce/Manipulate, with poooossible wiggle room to allow "what they want" to be "getting that gun out of my face". but that may be stretching things too far.
basically, really pushing the players hard on "so how are you using violence?" can be a good way to make them decide what to do - if a PC has +3hard but only 0=hot, deciding between Going Aggro and Seduce/Manipulate could either be very easy (duh! I'm good at Going Aggro) or a very fun, tough call to make (jeez, i don't *want* to hurt them, but if i do Go Aggro, i'm way more likely to succeed...)
on a totally different notehey, how 'bout them Threats, huh? isn't it awesome how turning something into a threat (of the right variety) can really make it come alive as a play element.
in my game, there's this merchants' consortium that was using a town, Bluesquare, as their big trading hub. well, then, Diamond the Chopper and Rue the Gunlugger come along and knock over Bluesquare, killing all but one (!) of the guards, whom they keep for questioning.
so now that they own the town, they're moving it over to, basically, communism. that is, the townspeople are now eligible for free food and medicine and stuff, provided some of them are willing to help bring in the harvests up north. this obv is going to fuck with the merchants' profit margins, since their wagons were the main source of food in Bluesquare.
so they're a threat. but making them a Brute or a Warlord didn't make sense. instead i went with making mercantile trade an Affliction, and the consortium is merely the "carrier" of the "disease". this works well mainly because all the Affliction moves involve the people who are infected, not the (possibly abstract or immaterial) disease itself. They'll also get my first Countdown Clock, too, but that's more for the consortium hiring mercenaries to take back the town if they find themselves stymied by Diamond's gang.
also - well done on reorganizing Shaky Dave et al. as Threats. it is absolutely the case that NPCs could go from the Home Front to other Fronts, sometimes quite suddenly. rock on!
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