Memes

Minimal resources devoted to improving it because they don't consider it a core component, I imagine. The systems as they exist now are highly abstracted, but they do make some sense to a naval aficionado. They are a bit lazy though.

There's a lot of systems they could have, but don't. Internal politics are poorly modeled for instance, compared to how complex they actually are. These things would fall under that room for improvement category, which is very large still. This entire genre has only hit like 5% or less of its potential so far. Where several other genres are closer to 95%.

If you want genuinely accurate naval simulation though, you need specialists for that, it's not as easy as it sounds. Most games that try do pretty poorly unless they're focused on it. PTO by Koei was pretty good, back in the day, though that's probably my rose colored glasses talking.