I'm an odd monkey who thinks HUDS are dramatically overrated for beginner players.
Reasons:
You need thousands of hands against an opponent for even the pre-fllop stats to start to mean anything at all. If your poker gut isn't already telling you 99.9% of what is available on the HUD, then you need to ditch the HUD and just start relaxing and paying attention to each player's actions.
Your brain wants to be lazy and using the HUD actually slows it down. Using the HUD makes the brain lazily not bother observing and thinking about information that is in the HUD, but people who don't use HUDs can eventually do all of that stuff in their heads reflexively, more lazily, since they're not relying on an outside source of information to seed the decision process.

HUDs are almost essential if you're trying to grind out mid-stakes (25NL+) for your primary income. You'll probably be playing against the same player pool day after day, and you will defintely be putting in a huge volume of hands against those players. The "uncommon" spots are going to accumulate data more rapidly, due to these circumstances. In those cases, you can sometimes get hundreds of thousands of hands against a single opponent, and that's where having a HUD shines.

Then at the high stakes levels of play, HUDs are almost non-existent, because those players have already internalized everything their HUDs once helped them with.


That aside:

Whatever the stat you want to use, remember that unless you have a few thousand occurrences of that situation, then the stat probably has error bars well over a few %. Think of what that means to your guessed ranges with small numbers. That 6% may be +/- 5% until you get a thousand hands (in that spot) on that stat. Well... 6% seems really useful, BUT "somewhere between 1% and 11%" is basically worthless. Your poker gut already told you that much.

The problem is that HUDs don't include the +/- with the stats, so anyone who hasn't taken a college level probability and statistics math course probably doesn't know how to interpret those numbers.

So, ultimately... if you've played over a thousand orbits against a player, then the VPIP by position stats are probably starting to be not complete garbage. I can't stress enough, that the information contained in those stats is probably NOT representing what most people think it is. So grain of salt.

To be fair to the HUD, the number it shows you is always the statistically most likely value of that stat. So, while the error bars mean that if the player is on a "hot streak" or "cold streak" that hasn't been ruled out. It is always the most likely case that they are NOT on a streak of any kind, however, the error bars are robust in quantifying exactly how likely that is and how much of an effect that liklihood has on the best-guess value.