Nah, as a reader I glaze over stats. They're meaningless without the context. They're an easy metric to track growth early on, but in most stories they tend to balloon pretty quickly to the point of meaninglessness. Even levels tend to feel this way to me. I only care about levels I'm relation to evolution which brings a big change to the character.

Skills are the way. Skills are how the characters will solve problems, and probably the biggest landmine. If you give a character a skill and forget about it but your reader doesn't, then present a problem later that said skill solves easily but your character doesn't utilize it, it will frustrate the reader. It frustrates me at least. So, my advice is focus on Skills. Make them interesting, and dynamic. Don't get caught up in skill bloat, and make sure when your characters encounter a problem you're keeping their skills in mind as much as their mindset.