@iwilliam, while I take your point – please don’t feel you need to explain it again, you’ve been quite thorough – I’d offer for your consideration that the word “illogical” is the wrong one. This simply isn’t a case where everyone’s intuitions point the same way. What seems wildly counter-intuitive to you is an intuitive approach for others, not least the original designers of CS (Edit: and apparently @Galador). Where intuitions clash, as here, there isn’t a single logical right answer – however passionately you may feel there is.
But there are ways we could try to resolve the visual ambiguity between the “slider” and “bar graph” ways of seeing stats.
To my mind, the current setup has one feature which makes it somewhat inapt for “sliders”: the number. As you note, it’s coded to “hug the left,” so many people will naturally read it as applying to the stat they see there. In your Finesse-Brutality example, you suggest that nonetheless people would naturally read this:
Finesse 85 ----------!—Brutality
as “My Brutality has increased to 85%, because the number is high and the edge of the slider is closest to Brutality.” And fair enough, I can see that.
But using the current setup as you suggest, if you lost Brutality (and thus had high Finesse), you would end up with this:
Finesse 15 --!-----------Brutality
And I’m not sure how many people would naturally read that as “My Finesse is high,” let alone “My Finesse is 85%,” even if they found sliders more intuitive – the number gets in the way.
Confusion would be particularly likely in games where some stats are percents and others are opposed pairs – say, The Fleet. There you have unopposed stats like “Striker Coverage” and “Cannon Skill,” which are essentially sliders already, alongside opposed pairs like “Force-Elegance” and “Integrity-Deception.”
Your proposed “workaround” with the current CS setup would have the sliders moving in opposite directions – i.e. if you increased Striker Coverage, the number would increase and the end of the bar move right, but if you increased Force, the number would decrease and the end of the bar move left. Have a look at The Fleet if this isn’t clear (the free demo will get you far enough to illustrate the point).
So I’d suggest the ambiguity will be hard to resolve short of tweaking CS code. Perhaps, as in @aetheria’s excellent example, we ditch the numbers. Then we’re clearly in slider territory.
Or we could put a number at both ends of the scale, with each number aligned to the stat it modifies:
Brutality 15 --!-----------Finesse 85
Which would hopefully help people make the perceptual shift from seeing it as a rabbit to seeing it as a duck… excuse me, from seeing it as a slider to seeing it as a bar graph measuring two 100-sum stats.