What if... you could choose between having or not having stat caps on your character? But if you choose the later there are also negative sides to it... YES, I'm talking full 100% real permadeath, your char is wiped as if it never existed, no porting to hf, no amount of stats get passed to the next char, no numen stuff, no silver lining, no nothing. You die you start from scratch, except for maybe spawning from your ancestor's hf and inhereting their land, but that's it. But if you choose to have a capped character then you're just playing by the current rules - porting to hf when KOed, never dying unless you fuck up, and if you die it's the current softcore death anyways. Seems like a fair deal to me - fly higher fall harder.
If you wanna make it even more fun, the caps can be dynamic and tied to the permadeath players stats somehow. For instance, cap = (stats of the strongest warrior that ever died)/<multiplier>. Dead, because from my knowledge of the past worlds the strongest of titans are usually raised by peaceful players, who just grind stats for the fun of it and never use them in PvP, so their characters shouldn't influence the statistics. The balance should be well tuned though: you want permadeath characters to be powered enough for people to actually pick them but not overpowered so people wouldn't be forced to pick them for PvP. Which I personally would be ok with but since most of the playerbase are pussies too scared of losing their precious characters.. ehh...