Simplifying stats and actor equipment Options

[kowbrainz]

I'm trying to make a game which uses three forms of equipment (weapon, armor and accessory) and where all actor and enemy stats are set super low so that every stat point counts. Sort of like how the Paper Mario games set up their stats.

I've heard that the default RPG Maker XP algorithms aren't really suited for games like this, so some help with changing this would be greatly appreciated. Also with the equipment -- while I have a basic understanding of programming in Java, C and Python, my efforts to tweak the default code haven't been very fruitful. :/