Yeah, fort events, land grab as well as the practice version at Tukar, are great fun! Having participated a lot in the latter, I think you underestimate how much there is for non-uber players to do in these events. Of course, lower-skilled players will be severely disadvantaged in direct, head-to-head combat, but repairing, healing others, shooting structures, finishing off enemies with low health, and even just distracting enemies' attention away from bigger threats on your own team are all valuable contributions. Oh, and any skill level player can command the Defense Turrets to useful ends.
While I grant that when one only considers the impact on the event itself, skill caps may sound like a good idea, my opinion is that they have a very negative impact on the overall Entropia experience, and should be avoided/removed in favor of better solutions. We've finally managed to remove skilling anti-incentives from Mayhem, and should strive to do the same for Gold Rush, fort events, etc. Skilling up should be a positive experience, not a set of tradeoffs we pretend to be able to manage despite having radically incomplete information about the game's future development.
The best way I can think of off hand to further enhance the lower-skilled player experience here would be to make each skill a slider instead of a static bar. Thus, a player who has 5287 Engineering skill points under the current skill system would have the free, reversible ability to set their skill points anywhere between 1 and 5287 at will under the new system. Then skill capped events could be created without excluding people, and no one would have to chip out or avoid skilling too quickly to participate. In fact, this system would further reduce the loss of affordance from skilling, as it would give players the option to temporarily experiment with de-maxing their items, reduce how much weight they can hold or how fast they can run, etc. These may not sound like particularly attractive options, but may have some niche use (i.e., when fruit could only be found by walking below a certain speed, maybe it would have been nice to have a lower weight threshold to optimize run speed just barely slow enough to still see the fruit), and are currently lost due to skilling.
The only thing lost under such a system would be the ability to cap giveaways to newcomers by inspecting their attributes, but if a giveaway is small in size, it will organically attract primarily newcomers. And if it somehow doesn't, the composition of participants is a reflection of their preferences for the prize anyhow, which seems to me a better metric for prize distribution than newness or skill level. If Player A cares twice as much about that 1 PED prize as Player B, shouldn't A have at least as much chance to obtain it as B, even if A has more HP than B?