I did not have time to review all the posts in this thread, but the title of it struck me because I do think statistics sometimes does become too much of a focus. Home Teaching for example has become a monthly reporting campaign to get numbers reported, and I routinely get text messages to report my home teaching as opposed to "Hey, how is so and so doing". I know the numbers are important for a lot of reasons, but I think the focus sometimes shifts too much to the numbers.