Premade Goals Are Maybe Bad?

So I have been intentionally avoiding adding the notion of "you do X to get some epic skin" kinda shit that I don't like about a lot of games these days. I love when you play a game and create your own goals because the game's systems are so deeply rich and complex that you're enjoying those more than just slogging along to get your epic skin.

That being said, I've recently considered the fact that as an indie, how do you get people to want to try to sink their time into your game to see / get a feel for if your game's systems are complex enough to inspire someone to want to make say, tons of high scores, in your game?
Indies really do come out daily so it's really a case of what do you do?

What i'm going to try is to add some legit objective to the currently recently added challenges to help guide the player along and hopefully inspire them to want to make their own high score goals. This is one reason why I don't want to add like a skin reward once a player completes N challenges as I feel like they see that but might overlook the piece by piece goals of each challenge up to the final that gives them "teh epic skin". So I guess in other words, my intent with this system that i'm now working on is to guide and hope that the player is attracted to the game enough to play it more!

I'm very interested to hear what others think about this topic. Thanks for reading and have a nice day!