The most memorable characters that aren’t memorable for what they did are the ones with really lopsided stats. But for every single memorable character of such ilk, there are 50 that are remembered for their actions, not their stats.  And is that a great way to be remembered? “Remember that character of Temple’s the wizard who had a higher strength and constitution than the fighter did? Haha he rolled crazy stats!” As opposed to “Remember that character of Temple’s, the wizard? And when he kept falling and taking damage as he was running from the Headspiders down that sloped cavern and almost killed himself? Man that was funny.”
I’m not saying that having an 18 strength or a 8 intelligence is a bad thing, just that it’s not necessarily the greatest way to own a memorable character per se.
For most characters, barring random roll, fixed placement oddballs, you’re going to have your three best scores where they do your class the most good. That’s a given 99.9% of the time barring a player who just wants to create something lopsided for dramatic or comic reasons like the 8 strength fighter or the 9 wisdom cleric. Heck this whole thing coined the idea of the ‘dump stat’ which used to be Charisma for everyone except Paladins. In the past editions characters were as a whole pretty average looking at best. 
So the question at hand is what if we just did away with hard numeric stats and instead the player described their character’s abilities?
So if instead of – “Hi, I’m Bob the stereotyped big dumb fighter cause intelligence is a dump stat for fighters and this is Steve the highly intelligent but asthmatic wizard who as usual put his good stats in something other than constitution.”
We had something a little more prosaic and less ‘fixed’, “My character, Kel of Clan Finnan, approaches and asks you about joining your group. He’s a fit but not overly muscled man dressed in well worn leather armour. At first glance he appears unremarkable but there’s something about him that catches your eye on a second glance, the roguish twinkle in his eyes that might indicate a keen intellect and cutting wit. You’ve heard of Kel, he’s known to be impetuous and leap in head first when perhaps he should have thought things through beforehand.”
As for the stats we simply give everyone the same +x across the board, or slightly more favorable to me, +x to their MAD abilities and +x-x to their other abilities. So the big dumb fighter while he’s roleplayed dumb actually has a reasonable intelligence. Because honestly how long would a big dumb fighter really survive adventures? Barring luck he’d quickly sucumb to the first riddle trap etc. And the sickly wizard? Dead the first winter.  And everything between those is generic already.
In other words make the game about the characters not the numbers.
I’m ambivilent on this whole idea personally. On the one hand I see it has potential to make the people make the characters memorable and unique rather than the numbers. It helps even out the MAD aka Multiple Attribute Dependency issues of classes like the Paladin (arguably the worst case of MADness). On the other I can hear it mooing and by the gods you’re supposed to have numbers for your stats and all characters will be generic. But for the majority they’re already generic to the point where it’s unmemorable in terms of stats.
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