Individual hunger bar/FEPs required for each stat. When you eat something that has 20 str/agi/con feps each of the agi/con/str FEP bars raise by that quantity, not a together collectively. This prevents gaining wrong stats from being harmful which removes a lot of autism min/maxing, and makes crafting on fighters more viable.
When one of the FEP bars fills you get one point of the corresponding stat, and some hunger for only that kind of stat. Remaining feps in other bars shouldn't disappear.
Ideally, hunger should not progressively go down, but rather be a static reset at the end of every day, 3 days, or however long. This prevents the same issue satiations have historically have, where it is always more efficient to feast in a specific time-frame that is usually just more often is always more good.
If the hunger gain/loss is reasonable, I think satiations could be yeeted entirely without any issues. It's just an over-complicated compounding effect, when just hunger alone should be able to achieve the same job - also satiations existing would still prevent you from eating "bad" versions of good food, which is bad.
If you really want a catch up mechanic just make how much hunger you gain when you gain a stat scale depending on your stats compared to global leader
This would:
1) Solve the issue of eating for hunger ruining energy
2) Make shit food usable
3) Allow people with shit industry/game knowledge able to keep up via pure effort, instead of having to into whale hunting/day 1 bear cheesing etc
4) Just be a lot less complicated and gay
5) Allow people to use alts less. EX: last world with salt my main had 1k dext/int, and that shit will not be reasonable to do this world without sacrificing an insane amount of actually useful fighting stats
6) Unfuck things for industry specific characters like miners, that always end up being agilets/brainlets forever because they need to push strength early
7) Make stat gain time-gates less autistic in terms of wanting to login and eat every 5 minutes
