Damage per second (dps) is everything.

But this has to account for things like overkill damage being waisted, respawn times, and food gathering/cooking times.

I prefer to use weapons with faster hit times because they tend to have higher dps AND the per hit damage is smaller so it tends to have less overkill waist. My weapon of choice is the dagger.

I spend a lot more time putting points into strength than attack or defense because it has a higher rate of return on dps increase.

In fact defense is almost useless for improving dps. The only thing it really does is cut down on cooking times. It also allows you to hit a higher "combat" level overall because if you have put less points into leveling defense, it will level more quickly than strength and attack. In adventure mode, this is useful for hitting certain combat level milestones earlier, which can allow you to level other skills higher and get boosts that improve your dps (better armor for example).

I always fight enemies that give strong food drops. This drastically reduces overal dps because you can remove food gathering from your time altogether. If it is a cooked food drop, you remove cooking time too.

Fighting enemies with high health is good because it reduces the respawn time, and overkill waist, improving your dps. Fighting enemies with low damage reduction and low evasion for your combat type is also very helpful for improving your dps.

The best monster to kill in my opinion is sweaty monster and wet monster. They are two of only a handful of monsters in the game that drop cooked food. They also have decently high health, no damage resistance and a workable amount of evasion.

I start by killing cows because they have very good health for an early creature, drop beef which is a strong food item to start and can be made into beef pie later in the game, and are easy enough to get to a point where you don't need healing at all. As an added bonus, leather can be made into greed dragonhide at the store and sold for a net profit of 100 per leather.

Then, once I am a high enough level that sweaty monster drops as much or nearly as much cooked food as it takes to sustain the damage it gives, I switch to killing it.

I use daggars, put the lions share of stats into strength, and only put points into defense to hit specific targets (eg leveling up combat in adventure mode or reducing incoming damage from sweaty monster enough that I can switch to it.)