m20/d20 and stats

Just noodling around a little bit.  I recently picked up the Moldvay book (on pdf) from http://www.dndclassics.com and have been rereading it (I also picked up the companion piece, the Cook Expert set, as well as "Keep on the Borderlands" and "The Isle of Dread"--the two companion modules that initially sold with the boxed sets.  I've been rereading them (although I admit that I haven't gotten very far.)

One thing that I had forgotten was the flatter bonus curve for ability scores.  Let me highlight--this little "chart" will have the ability score, the bonus in a Moldvay environment, and the bonus in a d20 environment.  m20, for what it's worth, tends to follow the d20, not the Moldvay, paradigm.

3	-3	-4
4	-2	-3
5	-2	-3
6	-1	-2
7	-1	-2
8	-1	-1
9	0	-1
10	0	0
11	0	0
12	0	+1
13	+1	+1
14	+1	+2
15	+1	+2
16	+2	+3
17	+2	+3
18	+3	+4

My goal in looking at this was actually to investigate the notion of doing away with the ability scores altogether and migrating to an ability bonus only as the ability score, i.e., your score would range from -4 to +4 (or maybe -3 to +3 if I used a Moldvay paradigm) instead of ranging from 3-18.  It looks like there are only three things that I'd need to address if so: 1) ability score generation, 2) attacks like poison, for instance, that do ability score damage, and 3) hit point generation at 1st level.  Of those, the third is really easy to come up with an alternative, but I'm struggling just a bit to find a solution to #s 1 and 2 that I like.

I also have to think about the range and distribution I prefer, since seeing the Moldvay range and distribution, and realizing that it makes a much better bell curve, has got me second-guessing what I've done with d20 and m20 for the last fourteen years.  And finally, I'll have to think about how racial stats interact with any choice I make. 

For those who care about the details of my m20 system (that is, just me) stay tuned here... as I noodle around these issues, there may be minor updates in the document.