The dude was asking for help and I told him where to find his help but you think he doesn't want or shouldn't want to read the help?Help is help. It's in the game and it's pretty concise and it's available right now and it has little bits of Gazz personality to it which I find hilarious in some of the journal entries.
The current system is perfectly logical. If you read the explanation it is clear and you can immediately understand how the interaction of the bars represents stamina, hunger, thirst, superficial damage, and more permanent damage. It IS more complex than it was in previous alphas but once you understand how it works it is incredibly intuitive and quite ingenious. In my opinion, it would be a tragedy to just return to simplistic bars. To me, it is worth a bit of reading if you can't figure it out on your own especially when the reading is short and to the point and exists in the game itself.
I get that you don't personally like the system but just because you don't like it doesn't make it illogical. It is a very good representation of how hunger affects stamina and hydration affects recovery and also for having a dynamic variable maximum of energy and health depending on what has happened to you, how you are exposed to the elements, and what types of first aid measures you've taken.
I guess if we were surfing a web page instead of using a graphical representation of a complex game status we would want to dumb it down for maximum user friendliness. Or we can have something more complex that a player can do some light in-game reading about if they feel they are a bit lost on how it works so we can actually feel like we are playing a game instead of just navigating through web links.
Most games in the world have instructions that can be read. It isn't a foreign concept to the gaming world though it might be to the web design world.
Boo! It's perfectly understandable and there are perfectly understandable instructions. We are playing a game. There can be some slightly complex rules in a game.....a game for adults no less.
Once you grok the system it IS simple and elegant for representing all that it does. If you needed to change anything I would say add a small bar on the bottom of the stamina that represents hunger and shows the full range all the way to the maximum overfill so people can visually see their hunger going down even when the stamina max is at the top.
And how can you grok the system? Less than 2 minutes reading a short description provided in the game.
Imagine...reading some rules about a game you are playing. Shocker!
Save yourself some work...
But... what do Rep points do? 
