Part of the first intention of aging was to get rid of the higher skilled characters in the game. A different approach to this problem is to have a penalty when their skills get too high. Maybe a percentage of their skills goes down at a certain rate, so the more skill they have the faster it goes down. That way they would have to work to keep their skills up.

The best thing to do with aging, in my opinion, is to choose a starting age and be done with it. I would enjoy this game that way much more than aging while playing the game.

On dying, I personally think that there should just be a penalty on skills and some of their trias or whatever they have. There should be no permanent death or losing items.