I played Imp with Nathan while it was in playtest and had a great time, but when I got the book and tried to run it I had a lot of trouble.

My chief frustration was the combination of (1) the PCs succeed at most every roll, and (2) there are no real fictional limits on what they can and can't try to accomplish.  The result of this was that it was difficult to have any kind of horror or even  just tension when the characters felt no meaningful risk of failure.  Furthermore, the game emphasizes difficult social situations and people with awful behavior.  But there is nothing to stop the characters from responding to any person behaving in a way they don't like with a stern scolding to make them reform - which will virtually always be successful.  Thus the game seems to suffer from the "social conflict as mind control" problem in an especially acute way.  

Open to thoughts on how to approach the game in a better way.

I'm sorry you had a disappointing time. I keenly feel that there's a learning curve to running the game, hopefully I can help!

A couple of questions, not to judge, just to investigate:

• How often were players making rolls?  I found in play testing that I had to really interrogate my habits on "when to reach for the dice," and that the general trigger of "when you impose your will upon the world" isn't just "when you want to do something" - impose is an important verb in that sentence
• Were players making rolls in situations where their ultimate goal was really finding out information? Again, making those "conflicts" ones that are handled by Ratiocination or the GM simply revealing that info cut a lot of die rolls out of my default habits
• Did characters have large die pools from their own sheets, or from the others giving them helping/Weirding dice (or both)? Did Lucidity drop early in the game, or was this with them at the 4-5 starting range? Were they getting enough hits that their stats weren't dropping either, or did they buy success at the expense of keeping their stats up?

For the social conflict thing, that's super interesting to me. Let me say this for now - the fictional limits of what they can accomplish are bounded by the monster and its effects on the world. You enforce that by following your principles, especially that you demonstrate the consequences of their actions with integrity to the dark Gothic world. What are the consequences of a stern scolding that makes the person reform in this world? They could promise to change their behavior and immediately backslide. They could go to someone with more power and tell them how scared they are of these crazed reformers. If the monster has their hooks in that person, they could break under the strain of being compelled in different directions. 

I don't know if that helps. If you're interested in workshopping a situation from your game as an example, I'd be up for that!

(Also, please jump in anyone who has some thoughts - this is a new forum and I assume fairly low-traffic, but I don't need to be the only voice in these kinds of conversations!)