Still looking for the Alien/Hostile sweet spot

 By way of not leaving it another 7 months before an update...I'm still messing with this. I've been back and forth on trying to develop a hybrid system of my own which is the procrastination trap leading to nothing ever happening.

Currently I'm thinking maybe the answer is actually to hack Alien so that it has a couple more character attributes and a lot more skills. In principle I like the Alien dice system although it seems like a real bucket-of-dice thing which might get tedious. But Alien lacks the variety in attributes and skills I want. So why not just bump both of those up, taking inspiration from Hostile and elsewhere? That way I get a dice system that seems to work for the genre but also the breadth of detail I feel Alien is missing.

Alternatively I was looking at Black Sword Hack which seems like it might work well, being a refinement of the Black Hack (I think?) with stuff like the Doom die which seems genre appropriate. It would need a bit of hacking to add further backgrounds and gifts for character advancement. Obviously it lacks a skill system but the 6 attributes plus Doom die feels like it would be a good option for a lighter model. Question is do I want the detail or the ease of play? Probably the answer is to try both and see how it goes.