Once upon a time this game had an elemental wheel like lots of other Final Fantasies. When they developed ARR, it was decided that it was too hard for the playerbase to understand (or something like that, I don't remember the exact wording), plus it would give us horizontal gear progression rather than the vertical one we now have. As far as I know, the only reason why the stats still exists is because some of the gear from 1.0 had it, and then it doesn't really make a difference.