I also feel that since we start with garbage skills we should be younger folk. The only plausible way for a person to end up with these skills is if they were a peasant farmer their entire lives and had a weak constitution and couldn't do anything. They would even suck at farming.
Considering we have a whole back story and fought in our history - we should have commensurate skill to indicate we were training and surviving. I think having a young character in the beginning would be better - I would definitely like to start off at say the age of 14 - which is fairly realistic age to be a squire (one of the backgrounds). Even a squire will be taught combat and ethics as well as communications - so even by the time you hit 16 you've learned a lot of basic combat skills and should have numbers in riding, leadership, steward and charm.