This suggestion inherently comes with some amount of criticism but I want to emphasize that critcizing isn't the point of this suggestion. That said... Sailing loot reliability, and by extension nerfing sailing drops, is a joke. The servers aren't reliable enough to justify the recent rapier drop nerf and in the post-rapier drop environment the shortcomings of sailing have only become more pronounced because now the line that makes sailing loot worth it or not has become even thinner. The servers aren't reliable. I don't think this is controversial. But it's relevant for sailing because sailing as designed rewards long farming periods while severely penalizing people for not adequately hedging against server failures. This has only continued to be true since the transition to whatever our host is now. Converting rental loot crates to have much larger perma-storage would solve this problem (server crashes destroying hours of effort) but since that seems to be a direction intentionally being strayed from I would suggest nerfing sailing drops even harder while boosting treasure cargo from all vessel types and perhaps even adding bonus factors based on things like crew Search skill.
As it stands sailing is a constant gamble of "Should we go back or risk a reset/crash?" This is an incredibly meta concern to encourage on an rp server. It's understandable that perhaps there's a philosophy of "Well we want to design mechanics to when things function as intended" but the servers have never functioned as intended. Servers going down randomly is a long running meme for Sail characters going back more than an irl year. It would make much more sense at this point to just accept that servers are never going to be sufficiently stable for the style of loot profit Sailing implements and to pivot into something which can actually be implemented with reliability such a Treasure Cargo which persists even when the servers crash randomly.