Oh nice. I hadn't tried that. I did try a game where I took the Stiffness penalty and then also boosted my Dex to more than 200 at character creation. If you do that, your Dex gets immediately reduced to 70 right after you click start game. Didn't try it again without Stiffness. Good to know that's an option.Oh...I was a Mountain Man in that start too, note the fine print. It's difficult to increase your Dex past 60 (or whatever it is), but if your Dex is already 201 you don't really need to increase it, now do you? Note that you can't take 'Stiffness' and try it as you'll think you're getting away with it until you get to the starting screen and see your Dex back to 70. I did it mostly for the 'Godzilla Protocol' and also because I wanted to create a physical superhero.
I also maxed Manipulation before taking my Skill Classes and Traits, sacrificing starting with mega influence and money to make the early game more of a struggle--and to get the best Traits and Skill Classes. I had Slaver-3, Soldier-2 and Hunting -1. My hope was to be able to strip-em, whip-em and shove a buttplug up their ass from the outset to get their Corruption up ASAP, and it mostly worked, though some (like Mae for some reason) are especially resistant to that butt-plug (it wasn't her traits either, I've tried it with many different Maes and had the same problem).
I get what you're saying about sacrificing Skill Classes to get more Traits, that's my basic inclination as well (don't pay for what you can train, take what can't be obtained later) but was just pointing out in an Ironman game being able to fight from the outset with little fear of permanent deaths is kind of an 'Enhanced' trait as well if you think about it.
As for fighting without deaths in Ironman, the issue there as I see it is the worst case scenarios. Eventually your followers are going to face a situation where they're low on health and then take a big hit. In that scenario even with Hulk armor they're going to die. So I don't think it's avoidable unless you only ever do easy fights. For instance a tier 7 bounty you're going to sometimes face cyber cannon wielding opponents (2 of them in the same battle sometimes in fact). It's not remotely possible to survive that in an ironman game. You can kill and/or capture 1 of those guys in the first round sometimes but there's no way you're getting both of them in 1 round, at least not without miniguns.