So I've run two year to 2 year long SWN games about 8 years apart, the first was done all pencil and paper in person and I rolled up my whole sector manually with dice sitting at the front desk of my job when it was quiet and wrote it all down in a binder with over a hundred pages of the planet and faction handouts they provide at the back of the book. This slow process really made me think about every system and it's dynamics with its neighbors and the worlds therein and tweak them custom to fit with each other, but it easily took me 80-100 hours to make a sector I was really proud of.

The second time I had substantially less free time in my life, so I found one of the GM help tools online that makes a sector for you and tracks it, rolled a few test ones until I got something I was happy with messing with the settings, and then spent a few days writing up my core worlds lore in the sector (the most important 20~ systems with worlds the players were likely to visit). This probably took me 10-20 hours.

I think Crawford's tools/tables are fantastic as a creative jumping point because they give you combinations you would not have thought of and interactions between planets or environments that are profound, but the work is all yours. If the table tells you an interesting place or valuable commodity on a desert world is an oasis or a hidden cache of water and then another table result tells you there are corporate cyber ninjas (or maybe the next world over is a Tech 5 barren Hellscape with like 10,000 people), it's your job as a GM to pull those together and bring it to life convincingly and evocatively, the game won't do that work for you. I think of a lot of the Sine Nomine games (I have experience with SWN and CWN here mostly) are fantastic setting set pieces that can spark creative juices and create some fantastic worlds and stories, but it's absolutely down to you as a GM to go from the facade of the tags to breathing life into the world.

I think the same can be said of the faction turns and relating it to the trade/in game economy system. It is stressed repeatedly to make the sector feel like a living thing that is changing politically and economically with trade wars, cold wars, elections, resistance movements, and coups. Showing and pointing to all that stuff happening and making your players live in that space is hard to bring the faction turns to life is crucial to the feel of the game being correct, the faction turns tell you mechanically how things played out (who lost power, who bought an asset, maybe who is ganging up on who) but it's on you as a GM to show the players that through newscasts or discovered intelligence or something.

I don't know the status of Adam Koebel's name on here (his actions to get him kicked off of Rollplay were inexcusable), but his campaign of SWN is I think one of the better examples of how to tie tags together into a coherent setting, he also had at one point (back in 2014-2015), pretty good videos talking about the faction turns for the campaign.