Sailing - Is it viable anymore?

[PowerWord Rage]

Again, not a sail expert here.

I'm under the impression that removing sail gear has only upsides. Please correct me if I'm wrong but pretty much anyone can get about the same sail gear, and doesnt need anything else on that gear set because you never sail and normal-combat at the same time to my knowledge. All it does afaik, is it saves a lot gear space for sailors. Granted, different DCs on sail content would be adjusted accordingly to account for the lack of gear bonus. I only see upsides to player QoL here.

There're some differences actually.
If player chose to include +sail stat into their combat gear, they'll effectively lose 1 skill stat to bump on basin and the only reason that they chose to do so, is not just because of the tedious swapping of equipments ( granted, most will say it's so ) but also because of unexpected boarding situation which, includes both NPCs and PCs(Extremely rare but possible, considering most players are not quite into it.)

I've recently found out, at least from how i had observed is, it's the hard rank investment and required feats for sails that's actually causing most players to move away from sailing. Granted, the soft skills dweomercrafting and gear swapping is another layer of trouble on top of that.

Unless you're wisdom based character or vigilante/warlock/pure swashbuckler, you'll definitely need to invest both skill focus & epic skill focus feat to hit the baseline of 50 before including the soft sail +50. And what's actually discussed right now, is to reduce the overall sails cap from 100 to 80 ( assuming +2 sails stats per equipment x 11 equipments ), for better QOL from having not to needlessly keep swapping equipments, does not fundamentally solves the problem.

And unless i've understood incorrectly, Rei Jin wrote, to reduce the overall sails score from 100 to 60 and that, includes not just the soft sails bonus from equipments but also the bard song ( +15-17 ) + good hope ( +2-4 ).

I'll simply conclude that from 100 to 80, could be a QOL boost but if further down to 60, does not falls under the category of QOL anymore but already deviate much further.

[-XXX-]

It's much easier to control skill balance through caps. Remove sail gear and stuff like bard song, good hope, sailing gift and greater sea god blessing become absolutely mandatory.

The notion of keeping epic sailing gear while removing basic sail gear doesn't make any sense to me whatsoever.