Is there any legit way to raise stats above 4 without editing the save files?
No, because it's a bug that was noticed today. It will be fixed tomorrow along with the hotfix. (hopfeully, given there's nothing else)
Andy found the source of the bug, that caused many random display issues, it's pretty deep into the code and it's late in Russia, so he went to bed and will fix it tomorrow. He expects it will take a few more hours along with testing.
Just a quick FYI on this bug, we noticed some oddities, but we couldn't get them to happen consistently. I reported it yesterday but we are also pulling down the console and doing dev stuff that makes it' even more difficult to identify the cause. Then I reinstalled the renpy SDK, and it went away (apparently this was only coincidental). So long story short, even knowing this much, we would have hit this bug regardless of release day.