The reason to disabling stats is pretty simple - those broke entirely very early in mod development for no known reason. To the point where picking the menu would just have it slide from the right, not stop for the screen, and continue accelerating into infinity.
Since the mod historically didn't store savefiles at all (unlocking everything on session start), this wasn't a problem.
Now that I've spent several days on getting savefiles working and transmittable in multiplayer, the issue is more apparent.
I guess I'll need to fix this sometime.