"On the other hand though, I've never seen this as necessary or restricting."

It can get a little annoying when you shield or charge while your cursor was hovering over them (while the HUD was locked), leaving your character only able to face that direction until you release the button.

It happens mostly as a gunner, when your cursor is likely to be farther away from you; when you click (especially to charge) the cursor movement will stop registering until you release the shot and move the cursor close to you again, forcing your character to stay facing that direction at basically zero warning.

I'd have to agree with OP though; the stats bar serves incredibly little to anyone who isn't a Guardian (and even then, most of them just take it for red that you need healed until you don't and keep the shield up for defensive purposes anyways, so not much would actually change for them either) and only serves to just knock a chunk of vision off one side of the screen.

Even with 1600x900 resolution, that's still a decent chunk of the left of screen covered; it's like the child of the offscreen advantage who's not quite grown up to be completely OP out the face, but has grown enough to be a noticeable irritation. Y'know, that kinda age in their life cycle where they learn to scream and cry and just make you do everything but want to go closer to it, and instead encourage you to just go the complete opposite direction and leave it to its self-obsessed whining in the corner of the screen while you do everything you can to remain sane and alive by huddling at the bottom right side of the screen and sniping anyone who crosses your path, knowing that until they invent hoverboards or the ability to walk through walls, nobody's goin' to get the sneak up on you!