Some of what I learned is related to the mechanics. My character excelled at Weird and Cool actions. This meant when I was trying to do things that involved weird psychic phenomena or getting (non-violent) things done, I was great. Of course as it worked out in play I tended to do those things so often that I had more than my fair share of failures.
Moreover I learned certain stats were equally if not more useful. The Hot attribute is really necessary if you want to you deal with people. In our game we had no one who had much of it and most NPCs were antagonistic to us. This wasn't just in the "causing problems for us" that most Apocalypse World games should have but in the "actively trying to kill or sabotage us" kind. Part of this was the GM and part of it was our inability to manipulate people except out of fear.
This led to an endless string of incidents where an NPC acted against a PC's interest and was either tortured or killed. Every NPC we met at the beginning of the game was dead halfway through. Obviously none of us had much of a gang. Worse this behavior bled over into our own interactions with PCs using violence on each other to get things done.
That brings me to the other stat I underestimated: Hard. Used in fights and threats to gain control over things or people, this attribute is fairly necessary in a game like I described. I think some of the other players failed to trust me because I wasn't as forthright as them. That was mainly because I couldn't use hard (my attribute started at -1 which meant I failed at most rolls) so I tended to use alliances and sneaky actions to get my goals accomplished.
Despite the fact my character was ultimately hung to death for reasons that to me seem thin, I did enjoy the game. My character was a sort of perpetual victim but it was interesting to explore her personality. Her only successful actions of resistance tended to have horrible consequences either for herself or others. She killed one PC by dragging his soul into the evil darkness and was killed herself for providing another PC with the nuclear materials he had been seeking. But in the end I felt like she had grown as a character.
Another thing I learned from the game is how playbooks build a game, with each playbook serving as a vote for the direction the game will go. A Savvyhead pulls the game toward building things, the Quarantine tells the game there are survivors from before the Apocalypse who are here to rebuild, and so forth. As in any game it is important of the GM to take these decisions into account when planning the game.
As for my gripes with the game, the main one (particular to the game I just played) is that hell is other people. The players can ruin a game more thoroughly than anything else. The antagonistic relationships we formed caused some hard feelings I think. In our next campaign, already being planned, we've decided to ensure we are all friends at the start. We also will have a more distributed set of attributes with fewer Hard cases.
Another flaw I saw goes to the GM, which is to not to be too hard with your choices of moves. You want to avoid giving the players situations where "murder them all" is the best choice. You want to have problems that can't be solved with violence, like diseases, people who need food or love, and similar situations. This gives strength to the other attributes. Also by going less hard, you give more reason for downtime and less to endless violence.
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