May be worth considering the effect time/connectivity has had on the landscape of this debate. Anyone with the nostalgia glasses, can you truly believe the game would play out at all similarly if players had the likes of discords and reddits and such available? Would crazy stat builds have remained the norm if the community was able to quickly and easily collaborate and min/max and optimize?

Idk. I have no other MMO experience. But, times change. No way of knowing if what worked then could still work now. Certainly at the very least it takes a different development approach, to make room for that sort of thing. Arguably, by building the game and combat system the way they have, the devs never really intended for much creativity with stats.