The contribution from strength to damage is pretty minor. On character creation you can only put 6 points into strength anyways, so you'll only ever be 6 points behind if you made a "mistake" by putting points into strength instead of dex on your ranged attacker.
Dex is actually reasonably useful for dodging. Considering that your back row does get attacked from time to time, and that your best armor is going to go to your front row, and your vitality is going to probably have been neglected in the back row, having an extra chance to not get hit is reasonably useful. If I remember, 6 dex is 3 evasion, which is I believe similar to wearing a phalanx shield. Except you get to use a bow.
Dexterity's primary function, in my opinion, is evasion. Melee accuracy is an ancillary bonus, but not really it's real purpose. It's a nice bonus though because those characters evading are likely those characters attacking with melee weapons.
Strength's primary function is dealing damage. Secondary is carry weight, which is again a kind of handy thing to have. Strength will be used for non-mages, and is often trained by fighter skills. Fighters wear heavy armor, and rogues wear light armor, but mages just wear clothes, so the strength stat helps to offset armor weight, as well as just adds some flavor.
However, the most important factor of your strength is going to be your weapon skill. The guy above doing tests between his fighter with high strength and his rogue with high dex, and showing the rogue winning is an example. A response was "you must be wrong, because STR is the stat that increases your ranged damage", but what wasn't mentioned was the rogue's skills. I'd wager that the rogue has a high bow skill. I also believe that even if you took a minotaur rogue and pumped strength and pitted it against a lizard rogue who pumped dex, if they both had the same bow skill and the same weapons, your results would be likely only a few points of damage off from one another. Give the dex bow user a few more skill points and he'll win. Likewise, if you get attacked from behind and the minotaur gets whacked and killed, but the lizard evades, maybe the lizard gets a few more experience on the way back to revive.
My advice to players who pumped dex on creation is just to suck it up. Sure, you misunderstood, but that was your mistake, and now you know better. Dex is not a worthless stat, but it doesn't increase damage. You could fix it, but really, there's no need. If you're playing on hard, consider it an additional handicap and a lesson learned. If you're playing on easy, well, what does it matter then? the game's easy
I'm not saying don't min-max. I most definitely do myself. I'm just saying, so you made a mistake... own it and move on.
its IMHO for balance reasons, if you compare the ranged skill and the trowing skill it seems that the ranged one is better, but you have to sacrifice both hands for it, while when you use throwing weapons you still have a hand free .
