My first few years with AW, I used to read the moves as requiring direct action on the player character's part. Sure, I read that you can go aggro or seize by force using your gang as a weapon, but I took it as a requirement that the character was physically present anyway, where the gang-as-weapon mainly affected harm inflicted and other consequences of the move.
When I realized that you could read a situation by, as Daniel Wood puts it, keeping your ear to the ground or drawing on your knowledge of the political landscape, that made the play immediately more fun. The PCs' moves are what drives play, after all, and running everything that is out of the PCs' immediate sight by MC fiat is, to me, a wasted opportunity.
If being physically present is required generally when you make your moves, what's the difference between a hardholder and a gunlugger and how they play, apart from one inflicting damage by gang and one by machine gun? I mean, apart from obvious stuff like the fictional circumstances around them and such. Since the playbooks aren't just about stat numbers and fictional resources, but primarily how they interact with the world around them, of course a hardholder, a gunlugger and a savvyhead would actually read situations in different ways, sometimes by keeping their ears to the ground, sometimes by taking a quick look out of cover in a firefight.
Take the glorious Maestro D' in Deadwood, Al Swearengen, for example. He constantly reads situations, and does all kinds of moves, by sending people out to do his bidding then watching their return with the results from his balcony, with a cup of coffee in his hand. That's cool!