It seems the key to Uesugi lies in fully utilizing the power of their starting province's defensive capabilities. If the enemy comes from the west he can sabotage nothing without going through your castle first, and if he comes from the east there's a bridge right there which is like having three castles at once on the defense. Also you start out with stupidly good diplomatic relations with all neighbouring clans (including Takeda), which means you can choose which way to expand: To Ikko's lands, making a triangular defense between your capital, Ikko's capital and North Shinado (once things sour with Takeda) or to Date's lands, using your capitol as an unbreakable unharrasable barrier while you crawl eastwards in the beginning.

You can ally with basically whomever you want, so directing where the early-game threat will come from is fairly managable. Taking the goldmine island+having allies in either east or west while you go the opposite way means the campaign is actually somewhat managable. You gotta commit to whatever approach you take. You just have to be willing to take the -1 honor blow from sacking your vassals. They are absolutely worthless and serve only to draw you into wars you have no interest in.

There is a lot of replayability in this campaign. We should really pool together experiences in a thread. Its very hard to see a clear red line to victory with Uesugi. In my current campaign I just went the coward's route and did the triangle-defense while teching +25 acc Bow Monks and +5 armor Warrior Monks, so after 60 or so turns I still only have 10ish provinces (but I can support 3 stacks of Monks/Samurais, since Metsuke are so easy to rank up now, excellent change). It also really depends on how the map develops. Hojo/Takeda/Imagawa getting entagled with Oda seems set in stone, but Ikko is the Joker times 600, as they can do anything with completely unpredictable outcomes. In my current game they had 7 provinces after 10 turns which makes them impossible to deal with if they decide you're going down (fortunately they went for Oda, win-win for me).

Good fun!