The mechanics of this game continue to reveal their potential. They save me a ton of work as a GM, and I still give the players the level of detail and plot connections they'd have if I'd sat for hours pondering something intricate. Not only that, it gives the players the sense that they are brilliant sleuths or investigators because their ponderings can be seamlessly incorporated by simply using the dice results. The players know that some of the connections are theirs, and some are not, but "some" is infinitely more involvement than previous games allowed or encouraged.
I've linked to this article a lot, and I'm going to do it again, the Three Clue Rule:
http://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/1118/roleplaying-games/three-clue-rule
It's a great starting point, and changed a lot of how I approach these issues. But the EotE mechanics lend themselves to an even more open form of GMing, one where you don't even have to predefine the clues, but end up getting the same results.
I run a pretty loose game. I know the main NPCs and their motives, and what kind of clock they are on. I also know there are connections between some of the NPCs, but at this point I do not necessarily know what those exact connections are. That's the point of this post. I don't need to know them. The players will either discover these actionable details through dice rolls where the advantages, threats, triumphs, and despairs are leveraged accordingly based on what I know, or they invent that is plausible, at the time; or I will simply provide them as a result of other actions if none of the more dramatic opportunities arrive.
I can give a specific example of how this has played out really well:
Background detail 1: before the game started, a local mine owner found some ruins in one of the caves in his mine. The mine owner, being a scholarly sort, immediately sent some pictures to the local university which passed it on to the university on Eriadu. They sent an archeologist grad student to look into it. The transmissions were intercepted by the Imperials too late, and after the PCs picked up the archeologist they lost track of where he went. The Imperials are still looking for the archeologist, and the PCs have only just become alerted to this fact.
Background detail 2: an Imperial Admiral is trying to corner the market on certain minerals and other resources. To that end he is hiring local "talent" to intimidate local mine owners into giving up and selling. The pieces come together for the PCs because the same mine that holds the ruins is also under active sabotage on the orders of the Admiral. The Admiral has not made the "ruins + minerals" connection yet. The PCs prevented an assassination attempt by a local gang, but weren't quite sure why the mine's droids also attacked them.
At first the two details don't appear connected, but they are.
Clue 1: the players are trying to determine why the mine owner's mining droids attacked them. They find an extra part installed, and attempt to backtrack the signal to its source. Failure + Triumph. So I ask how they want to use the Triumph, and one player suggests that the local location is actually a relay. Bingo! This is now injected into the plot and fleshed out by me behind the scenes: the local NPC is an Imperial agent working under cover, sending transmissions to the Star Destroyer in orbit. The extra clue the PCs have gained, which they didn't have before, is that there is a direct Imperial link.
Clue 2: the players have managed to disable a probe droid, and use it to try to hack into the SD in orbit. Again, Failure + Triumph. They didn't have any specific ideas that worked within the bounds of the plot, so I described the failure as "interference from some local source, preventing them from making the connection to the SD". The Triumph was being able to narrow the origin down to five houses. Is that how I'd intended for the players to make the connection? No, I had no idea how they were going to determine this, but leveraging the dice results made it easy.
Clue 3: having narrowed down the encrypted signal source to one of five houses, they proceed to check them. They visit with the old retired couple at the end of the block, and after a bit of chit chat (and a good Charm roll), the woman reveals that she thinks "squatters" are living in the empty house next door. After a "we'll take care of it ma'am" they go to investigate. Poking around they get a success, but several Threat: they find a buried wire capable of transmitting data, but at that moment, the two Duro children living next door burst out of their house to play. This Threat leads to a new opportunity: a tense scene where the children are scared of these "strangers". However, good Negotiation plus 5 credits for ice cream results in lots of success and advantage, so the kids spill a story about being up late one night ("don't tell my mom!") and seeing someone mysterious bending over the area where the wire is.
Had I planned for the children to arrive? No, all I knew is they existed.
Had I known they had seen the "mystery person"? No, but it was an opportunity to provide a description.
(As a side note: children NPCs are a great vehicle for imparting almost any information because a) they invoke some sympathy from most players, even those playing badasses; and b) because it's a well-understood trope that children are often overlooked observers.)
Almost all the clues in my campaign have been delivered in this way so far, and it takes almost no planning. At least half the time the connections and clues come from the players themselves, or their idea is so compelling that it becomes incorporated into the main plot. What is required is a good handle on NPCs and their motivations, and something unique to them, such as a concern they might have or a phrase they might say.
The reason this works so well is that because of the two axes, there is almost always something to work with. Even a completely flat roll is an event. So there are almost never a shortage of opportunities to provide whatever information seems suitable at the time, and almost never a shortage of opportunities to incorporate player ideas and present it as an authentic insight or discovery. It also makes for a more organic game, in that I can respond to new ideas without feeling like I've wasted hours dreaming up connections that are suddenly invalidated.
Anyway, maybe I just had to vent how I am continually enthused about how this game works, but I hope this was interesting or useful.