Removing the impact of gear from an RPG is something that should never happen. If you want that kind of PvP there are other games for that.
Stat templates were awful for several reasons, most importantly they removed the ability to pick your own secondary stats, which was atrocious, especially after coming from MoP and WoD where we could buy specific pieces of gear with the stats we wanted off a vendor. If you wanted to stack versa,tility, you could do that, if you wanted to stack haste, you could do that, no RNG, no luck, you just do it... But also they eliminated gear progression from half of the game, it's an RPG, gearing is part of RPGs and stats on gear is a big part of character customization, if you don't like that you should play SMITE for your PvP or something.