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I don't think will add this feature in version 1.0 since... is not good to add last-minute features, but I thought that perhaps a solution to the Skill exploit would be to have each Base Class limit the attribute value somehow. For example, since level 30 is the max (but I don't think many people will get at that before expansion is out) it means there are 30 x 3 = 90 Attribute Points to distribute. So we could do something like this:
Warrior: No Strength limit, Skill limit of 30, Will limit of 50
Thief: No Skill limit, Will limit of 30, Strength limit of 50
Mage: No Will limit, Strength limit of 50, Skill limit of 50

this way only the thieves will be fast, but it will be balanced because they can't tank. I think this might be more effective than trying to change Fost's skill for all possible strategies

Actually you'll only have 87. There's no bonuses gained at level 1. Hrmmm...changing it to the Diablo 1 approach...it may or may not work although it might also create different problems later on. To be fair, the only ones who will be adversely affected by this will be the Warriors since the Mages start off with extremely low Skill and it'll be harder for them to hit the Skill limit that you're proposing.

My idea was to make the delay reduction from high speed depend on the base delay of the skill. That way the faster skills will benefit less, but the slower skills will see more use.
Actually, it might have been a good idea to get rid of speed completely. If a character was fast or not would have depended entirely on the skills at his disposal. It's a bit too late for that though.

I honestly don't think you need to remove speed at all in the first place. It makes for a good strategic factor whereby how you plan your characters affects how you play the game. That being said, I do think that you're going about the whole speed is broken thing the wrong way. As I've mentioned earlier, the best way to ensure that the player gets a good challenge is to toss in multiple opponents against the player's party. It breaks the player's focus fire tremedously since that's the best way in Loren to dish out damage and forces the player to priortise which enemy they should take out first.

For example, the party faces a group of six enemies, comprised of three warriors, one archer, one healer and one mage. The warriors hit hard and inflicts aoe damage to the front-liners as well as the slow status effect. The archer inflicts paralyse and poison status effects as well as being a high speed, medium damage character who likes to hit the back liners. The healer heals and the mage deals party-wide area damage. Who should the player take out first? Most cases, people would say take out the healer or the mage first. That is true, up to a certain extent. In Loren, if you are deal enough damage to drastically lower the healer or mage down to a certain amount of hp, the warriors will take guard another on their turn, rendering all the damage you did earlier useless. You could try to take out the warriors first but they have high defenses and there's usually three of them, thus you give time to the archer and mage to wipe out your party. Taking out the archer is an option since their status debuffs and their targetting tendencies can result in a TPK before you even realise what happens but you still need to make sure the enemy warriors don't take the guard another action.

There is a surprising amount of depth that you already have in the game already, despite how simple the combat structure is. I highly recommend that you take advantage of the depth you have, instead of tweaking the numbers of the game and in the process, maybe cause a lot of other unintentional problems.

I just got by email a long list of other minor bugs (nothing game-stopping, but some weird inventory behavior) so I am thinking to also tweak the final battle with Fost so that there's not one single opponent. I have in mind how to do that without breaking the story (since it says that you fight only against him). So, apparently 0.96 won't be the last version before final release

You're going to "cheat" by splitting Fost up into component parts? Gauntlets, breastplate, helmet, etc? Works especially since he's in giant form. I can see it as the party working together to take out individual parts of Fost's armour, until they're down to the heart of the matter.

Yes that is a good idea This way the party will have to fight against Fost but also against more than 1 single enemy, so the battle will be less tedious!

plus if my memory serves me there are 6 components.

It was 5 (helmet, breastplate, greaves, gauntlets, and boots), but you could easily break some of them down into pairs. Not sure if Jack will want to utilize them all.

I have made the battle, using only 4, since I thought was a bit weird to fight the leggings
I made the helmet, the breastplate and the left/right gauntlets. Each one fights in different style. I think the battle might be even too hard now, but I'll let people judge since I realized I am not really a good player playing my own RPGs!
I'm probably going to upload 0.97 in few hours, there are some other bug / typos fixed as well.