Thoughts?
I tend to advocate stats over skills primarily because you need far fewer of them, and I can't say I like specific specialties that you get to write out yourself - it leads to people putting up specialties that are either 50% completely goddamn useless or 100% completely metagamed and boring. Let people have their broad, steady bonuses that work in a variety of cases - it lends itself to people being able to improvise a wide variety of solutions on the fly, and you always want your players trying to improvise.
Alternatively, you could combine stats (stab-steal-sabotage-scam) and roles (engineer, security, space pirate, strongarm, intrepid farmer). Have stats give bonuses, and roles give advantage (when acting within your role, such as getting incredibly drunk, using single shot plasma pistols or engaging in laser cutlass duels as a space pirate, roll twice and take the better result, or double the stat bonus).
Add onto that the races, giving each one two special abilities, which are extraordinary things they can do that the other races cannot (spider men can climb walls and make webs, dolphin people can operate underwater unhindered and echolocate, snail people can lubricate surfaces and retreat inside a very tough shell, bird men still move and operate at half capacity while sleeping and navigate by magnetic fields, rock men can do mineral empathy and survive in the vacuum of space, that kind of thing).
Well, that's the way I'd do it, anyway. I think I'm basically just designing my own game at this point, though, so feel free to do your own thing.