To be honest, keeping the statistics separate won't do anything - how do you think the players near the top of the leaderboard feel about being at the top? Now compare these current feelings to if they shipped their statistics out to some dusty box in some complex database, "Oh, I'm just a has-been."
The leaderboard reset would definitely demotivate many, many players from playing, as is evidenced by this thread. They worked hard for these statistics, and putting them on a different database really wouldn't do anything to solve the problem. If this idea were to go through, you could honestly save yourself the trouble of migrating the statistics, because I see it as a waste of time.
Checking in on the note of "It will give new players a chance to get to the top!", that's just a futile argument. With how competitive this game has become (for better or worse, you decide), it shouldn't be that easy to get near the top of the leaderboards. Heck, if the new leaderboards were established, just think of the growing number of hackers, boosters, and players who play all day. While the last note is irrelevant in this argument, the first two are simply anti-competitive and downgrade the general feel of the game.
I'm aware this has been said so many times, but why not daily / monthly leaderboards? This would, in my mind, solve pretty much all the concerns people have about the general idea of statistic resets. Keep the (old) leaderboards where they are; don't even change that, for the sake of the betterment of the community. However, add two new leaderboards; daily and monthly leaderboards, perhaps regional ones, too. That way, if players want to push for the top, they can. In my mind, this proposal benefits all parties; veteran players and newer players. However, a wide statistics reset does not solve any problems, but rather implicates our situation even more.
