Your final thoughts there have kind of been my experience with The Mission. Having played it a number of times now, I find I'm either in a really tough spot where there are some decisions to be made or I'm just walking all over the game. Having not played The White Tribe, I can't comment on what's going on with your game. In The Mission, it's almost always that I just got very lucky with the dice.
That's not to say there aren't meaningful decisions to be made. There are, but there just aren't usually very many to make (outside of the obvious ones). In comparison to another Madison design, I find I get to make more impactful decisions in Don't Tread on Me. Dice and random chit pulls still drive most of what happens, but I still feel like I'm making decisions that have an impact on the game.
Despite often being very, very controlled by the dice instead of any real decisions that I've made, I still find The Mission oddly interesting and I'm honestly not sure why. I'm pretty sure I'll trade it off at some point in time, but I'm not quite ready to do that yet.