A friend and I hacked what we called shticks into ADRPG around 2002.  They didn't trump the attributes (although they modified them) in our game, they were more used to allow players to have specialties outside the attributes, to better allow for characters like Random and Flora.  Things like "Queen of Gossip","Right Place, Right Time", "Machiavelli learned from me" really made that game run. I never really connected them to Aspects, but it looks like they came from similar ideas.