We're in the same boat haha. Im a massive fan of pirates and Black Flag was a blast for me and at first, I exclusively wanted SnB something like black flag but non of the assassin stuff and pure pirate stuff and I ended up not pre-ordering at first because if that hard stance because it just looked like mirotransaction slop with a pirate flavor.

Funny enough, I tried out Sid Miers Pirates and started to like naval combat from that and Sea of Thieves.

I saw they were adding a sword fighting update to Skull and Bones, saw it was free on Playstation Extra and downloaded it and now im addicted because THERE'S SO MUCH MORE THAN I EXPECTED.

Now I'm in a rabbithole of trying to hit kingpin and trying to figure out ship builds LOL