Those are statistically relevant numbers and if you're asking for fair play then it behooves you to recognize that there is something off here. If you then look across whole teams you may have a team that is 90% efficient versus another that is 95% just based on the stats alone. Think also from the commander's perspective in pubs (though .. it's a pub!) do I really want to lead a team half of which may have under-leveled weapons? Do I want to trust them to cover me (if they even bother to?) Then think of how many misses (barring hit reg) was due to sway?
On a theoretical level, yeah, obviously any sort of advantage, no matter how minor, is going to be an advantage, and there will be the potential for it to change outcomes in at least some number of cases. I don't disagree with that premise. I just think that, with the way it's implemented and with the way RO2 usually plays, the scope of those altered outcomes is severely limited, as the stats that are boosted are limited in what they can effect.
Probably the single biggest gameplay theme of tactical shooters in general is setting up scenarios such that your enemies don't even get a fair chance. Through positioning, teamwork, surprise, preparation, what have you, your ideal outcome is to not even give the enemy a chance to effectively counterattack at all. When it comes down to who out-aims who or similar twitch events, both players have fundamentally failed already, in that they've given the enemy an avoidable opportunity to win. There are plenty of shooter games that focus entirely on that part of gameplay and make a fine game out of it (I do loves me a good Descent/Quake 3/TF2 style game) but RO2 is not one of those games.
If you were to compile data on every kill made in RO2, I'd bet a large majority never even see it coming. A majority of the ones that do see it coming didn't have anything resembling a fair chance to fight back. A significant portion of even the fair fights are heavily influenced by random chance, be it who gets the next server physics frame closer to their action, who gets the better recoil, who has the better ping / framerate, you name it. The stat boosts can, in the rare case that all other factors are equal, influence those fights, but the amount they affect them is dwarfed by the amount of randomness already involved. It's very hard to point to any particular scenario, even if you examine it carefully frame-by-frame, and state with certainty that the outcome was due to one person's higher stats. To even get to that point of examination, you're taking a subset of a subset of a subset of game events. They're often the most tense events, and so tend to stand out beyond their significance, but they're still only a small part of the game in the wide view. A new player especially is going to have a hard time just getting past the "oblivious target" phase in the first place, by the time he's progressed enough that stats begin to matter, he'll have accrued a fair amount of his own.
So, while it is, of course, a statistical inevitability that some outcomes are changed by the stat system, I don't think it is a common enough event to affect the metagame, and so I don't think RO2 deserves the flak that your typical rank boost system merits. That's really all I'm arguing for here, RO2's implementation in the specific rather than the concept as a whole.
Anyway, yeah, defektive has hit the nail on the head in the general sense. A stat system either causes issues with fairness, or it winds up being essentially pointless and the question arises, why bother? The cynical answer to that is that monkeys love a Skinner box
Look at the massive traffic the forum had over the bugged stats on release, and how you occasionally still find someone grumbling about the reset. It doesn't matter if the numbers actually do anything, as long as there's numbers to increment to get a new shiny: ooo, shiny!
