When i was a believing jdub I never thought too highly of Awake!... it seemed quite ludicrous to offer people cooking recipes and the like when they were supposed to have an urgent life-and-death spiritual decision to make...
Looking back from the outside, it may well be that it was helpful in keeping one-track JWs (such as myself) even mildly interested in something else than the Bible and doctrine.
As a side note, I had to translate Awake! into French for a few months (after I was discharged from the Watchtower for asking too many questions) and it was quite a challenge. You had to gather a lot of information in a very short time, just to be able to use the correct technical vocabulary in a wide range of topics (I still remember the first mention of AIDS when almost nobody in France knew what it was and there was not yet an official translation). After you did the research though, you often ended up frustrated with the actual contents of the articles.
Among the other WT literature, what I most enjoyed (comparatively) was Aid to Bible Understanding, the Commentary on the Letter of James, a similar book on 1 Peter (forgot the title) and quite a few Watchtower articles in the late 70s. Later I learnt most of those were written by soon-to-be "apostates"...