D&D General Rangers should be built on a primary and secondary stat

[Willie the Duck]

opinions and/or suggestions?

This is one which I'm always torn with. On one hand it does feel a bit like just a stat tax, due to every character basically needing it as their 2nd or 3rd highest stat, while it's not used for any skills or directly as a stat you think about.

On the other hand, keep away from my 8 con monk!

Sometimes you just want to make wtf builds involving con (highest or lowest stat) which sure aren't meta, but can be great fun to play.

Here is my hot take (for a theoretical game re-work): make stats matter less. At least to your class's main task resolution (combat to-hit and damage, spell to-hit or save DC). The primary determiner of your main class tasks should be your class and level, full stop.

Attributes should handle minutia and specifics -- encumbrance and skills and maybe saves -- and hopefully some new features that make being a strong wizard or guile-full fighter useful.

This way you can have a really smart wizard or a really dumb one (outside of a few 'I chose no spells with a save or to-hit' style builds, which only works for some classes). You can have dexterous wizards and smart fighters and charismatic clerics (and the contrapositives of all this) and it matter. Moreover, people will actually do it (outside of very specific builds or no-consequences campaigns), since either way you can still fight as a fighter and cast as a caster.

"Make weapon attacks with your spellcasting stat" was one of the worst directions to head with 5e IMO. IIRC it started with Hexblade in Xanathar's, and spread from there throughout the design space.

I’d personally argue that it started with making Dex functionally interchangeable with Str for melee attacks in the PHB, meaning you could have good melee attack rolls, damage rolls, AC, ranged attack, and stealth in the same package with one good stat, and zero downside for dumping Str completely.

At some point a lot of people seemed to stop seeing the stats as meaning anything in-world, and just instead being 'arbitrary attack stat 1-6'.
The constant gamification is something I really dislike about the 4th and 5th edition directions.

I'd argue that we saw the start of the thing in 3e. Finesse-weapon fighting did retain concern for Strength in the damage total, but not the same as (the previous example of) playing a bow fighter in 1/2/3e since you would be using it on builds where you'd be hunting for a bunch of per-attack damage boosters like 3e sneak attack anyway. Depending on how far we stretch the concept, all those classes and prestige classes that gave you +another attribute mod to AC.