Sad to hear that of your wife. Hope she gets better!

About "Don't starve", I also bought it and I think it's a great game. At least from the start, there is so much new stuff that really keeps you hooked. Later when you master everything, you really start to miss the multiplayer. Still a great game though.

Have you seen this page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attribute_%28role-playing_games%29
I probably like the storyteller system the best, so I will follow its system for my suggestion.
So you have actually 3x3 matrix. One dimension are groups (physical, mental, social), the other are categories (power, finesse/speed, resistance/inertia).
Usually in my ideas I only go with 2x3 and leave out social group of attributes, since for classical RPG fighting it is not really necessary, but in your case I think it would be maybe nice to consider it. I also don't like suggested names so much, so I usually go with:
- Strength
- Dexterity
- Endurance

- Intelligence
- Wits
- Willpower

But my case is definitely different than yours. It also depends if the character will be able to advance in these attributes or not. We all know that you can train for days and your muscular mass can increase, consequently your strength is bigger. All is probably true for all those other attributes. If you go with static attributes, probably different names would be more appropriate.
I agree with you that player's skill should have bigger impact on gameplay than attributes. In any case, I don't see the problem in the first three: Strength, Dexterity, Endurance (same as Constitution maybe, but Constitution you are born with and you cannot affect it later imo). These are all physical attributes of the character that you cannot really impact with your input, as you already said (except maybe with decisions of what your character do/train?). Intelligence is maybe good for signifying how strong your char's spells are, or how difficult spells he can learn (depending again on the implementation of spell learning). The name is probably bad, but you are searching for something similar as I can understand from your post (maybe Mentality?). Wits is probably also not good for you, it depends on the player how well he is able to trick/deceive others. In my case it is mostly meant for casting speed, evasion, accuracy calculations (maybe Wisdom would be better name), but most of this doesn't apply to you. The last one is Willpower, usually used for magic resistance. Again, debatable if it would be good to use it in your case.
I certainly wouldn't go with luck. It is unfair, you are born with it, you cannot train it, it is just there to annoy the others who have it low.
Your Lore attribute I would put under Wisdom or some other Magic category attribute.
Also all the senses that you mentioned, I would add this as a passive/active skills that you can learn (by meditating or whatever). If you will have skills of course ...
I wouldn't live nothing to exclusive race/attribute selection at the beginning. I would rather have it that the player can improve his character by playing than leave him locked in chosen mindset from the time when he created it.

I know that probably my suggestion is not the best for your case, but I must admit that I like it best, because you have the same number of attributes for each of your attribute groups. So you can strive and make all attribute numbers worth the same. In opposite case, whoever is playing fighter will have his attribute points worth less if he has three attributes to fill instead of 2 if he was playing mage. Depends again on how you implement all this.

Note that I come from Lineage2, Morrowind/Oblivion/Skyrim, DAO backgrounds, so my opinion is heavily biased.

I congratulate you on your work on Mythruna and JME3 community.
Keep it up and have fun!