Very hard to convince my friends to keep playing this game

I’m just theory-crafting as a player (I’m not a game designer myself), so I can’t provide a template, especially not without in-depth knowledge of V2’s game design, but if you consider how it might work with the existing game design, Career Talents/Skills and Weapon Bonuses (Properties and Traits) could be unlocked via earned XP (instead of Levels).

Similarly, Hero Power and Health could be replaced with percentile (%) attributes such as Weapon Skill, Ballistic Skill, Strength, Toughness and Wounds (all taken from WFRP) which affect damage taken/received, but can be increased with earned XP and are capped at 100%.

As for Careers, it depends on how you want to model them.
WFRP allows characters to migrate through several different careers (more like “jobs” or “professions”), using earned XP to switch between them, but this is because a player typically only has a single character but there are about a hundred careers in total, of which they might choose a dozen or so, over the lifetime of their character.

Here is a list of careers from 2nd edition: WFRP 2nd Edition Careers
(Basic careers offer progression into Advanced careers)

However, as there are only maybe 3-6 careers per “hero” character in V2, you could provide the player with all of them, separately, from the start (instead of unlocking them at certain levels), so they can choose whichever career they like and start unlocking talents/skills/advances/bonuses for it with earned XP etc.
Alternatively, you could opt for a combination of (e.g. 3) Basic and (e.g. 3) Advanced careers with the latter being unlocked once the former are “completed” (or some qualification is achieved)…