Sailing combat opinion dump

Had a bunch of ideas rattling around that I wanted to put into writing re: sailing combat. For context, I play an iron and have grinded out ~350 vampyre kraken for bottled storm, 1k sharks for dragon hook, 16 ray barbs/narwhal horn/swift albatross feathers etc. primarily using mith cballs and rune cannons

• The conventional weapon damage clamp felt really weird/bad at first, especially with low tier cannons/balls, but I did get used to it before too long. I think it is good that significant dps upgrades come from higher skill levels and combat can't be brute forced with bis landlubber gear, while not being 100% reliant on strong cannons/balls. Maybe the lower-tier sailing mobs could be a little more vulnerable to conventional weapons, it did feel bad trying to farm cotton/hemp seeds from birds early on with a rinky dink cannon.

Most of my current pain points cluster around "it just kinda feels clunky".

• Most high tier mobs spawn in tight clusters in multicombat meaning you have to camp on the edge of a cluster and tag one or two spawns, but if those mobs spawn navigating away they'll quickly be out of range to tag. Precise navigation is tough to do on a boat, and I almost never sit with one of my crewmates on the helm, since if you miss one of the mobs' hitboxes, your boat starts doing 360s, sometimes dragging my character out of conventional weapon range...
• Mobs attack your boat interrupts SO MANY actions. Trying to futz around with stuff in your cargo hold? Do a little crystal extracting? Really tough.
• The animation is cool and all but it sometimes take an eternity to harvest a dead mob, or again paths me to one edge of my boat, leaving me out of range with conventional weapons on the other side. Sometimes auto-pathing just doesn't work with conventional weapons, even though there is a part of my boat I can stand on and be in range.

Some thematic ways these problems could be addressed:

• I liked the idea on here the other day about crewmates having certain innate talents to give a little more life to selecting crewmates, similar to the keg facility. I'm not certain how to balance it perfectly, but for example I like the idea of choosing X out of a slate of Y options including things like -Increased cannon range for luring mobs more reliably -Slight cannon dps increase -Small passive sailing XP buff -Auto-harvest slain sailing mobs -Cannonball saving/salvaging passive, even if weaker than Avas. I'm sure other people have ideas about other passives that would make it feel better
• Another option rather than attaching these buffs to sailing crewmates would be further expanding the facilities. Let me attach a scope to my cannon for some resource that extends their range, let me build an auto-harvest net, let me stick a giant magnet for cballs that's a rare drop from the slayer boss on the front of my ship, let me build a crow's nest on my sloop that my character can climb up to and get a big conventional weapon range buff...

I'm not a huge hater when it comes to sailing combat and there are a ton of fun and thematic ways to address some of the biggest pain points I have outside of pure dps/drop rate gripes that I would love to see addressed or added in some way. Curious to hear others' thoughts.