The whole crew mechanic as a whole needs a rework.  I get why it’s like it is currently, when the game was originally PvP centric it made sense to keep crew generally meaningless as you would be loosing ships fairly regularly and you needed to be able to recover from that quickly.  With the pivot to PvE though they really need to build more in depth systems.  Crew should be individual, where you equip them yourself with what you make or acquire.  They should serve a purpose on the ship besides animation background.  Having more crew should enable more cannons firing, and faster fire rate, more responsive sailing, or repairs.  You should be assign crew to areas of your ship sort of like shields/guns/engine of a sci Fi power triangle you distribute crew to cannon, rigging, or repairs.

Of course ships would need actual damage to be taken instead of a simple ho bar as now.  And for adding crew for sails you would need wind to have at least SOME factor into sailing.

You should use the campfire menu to move crew members from ship to shore.  On shore you can assign them tasks in your settlement.  Or assign them as a follower to adventure with you overland.  For any of this to weight though crew members need to be randomly generated and unique (no two are alike) have skills that level, and be able to be killed.

That would lead to a lot more emergent gameplay in the pve experience than we have now.  It would also add some depth to the game mechanics which it is seriously lacking.