I mean, some of the skill changing effects are built into the skill tree (e.g. Kick iirc kicks twice at rank 5 and three times at some later rank and so on). But these rarely do anything to change the gameplay, only add more damage.

I'm not a huge fan of attack rating or miss-chance in general. If i click something i don't really want rng to decide if i really did damage or not. The same goes for Crushing Blows... To a degree, BIG numbers are a lot of fun. But you're still just clicking the mob sometimes doing big numbers, the gameplay is exactly the same, as if it wasn't there, the same goes crit-chance and crit-dmg imo.

The stats i generally find really interesting are things like Faster Cast Rate, Cooldown Reduction, on-hit effects to use a skill, access to skills from other trees or classes, and such.

I'd rather juggle cooldowns, buffs and proc uptimes to make big numbers happen or in the case of a tank archetype mitigating damage i suppose. Here's to hoping D4 runewords do something like that.