However not having stats to place kind of defeats the purpose of almost any game.
I don't think you can make such a broad statement, as that really depends on what the purpose of the game is. cardinal quest is closer to the "deal with the hand the RNG dealt you" camp (like e.g. brogue or nethack) than to the "decide which style of play you want by building your own character" that you see in more RPG-ish games like TOME4.
CQ2 is incidentally the other way around and let you advance through skill trees (unique to each class) as you level up, but that is not so much fixing a fault in CQ1 as much as CQ2 having a difference purpose/philosophy and adapting the design accordingly.
