All in all, your logic is sound, but the diatribe is missing some essential facts. For instance, similar to the marine mine action you mentioned, a fairly common tactic for human-crewed ships (non-solo) is to drop off the back of the lead ship while holding a gunpowder barrel/keg and attempt any number of damaging goals from detonating it under the ship as it passes to doing so in various places onboard (my favorite is the crows nest as the game doesn't seem to count the elevation as distance for the fire spreading, and hardly anyone looks up, so the attacking crew tends to take a long-ass time figuring out why their ship keeps catching on fire). To sum up, this more than dying game has had years to correct the long list of bullshit, and PvE is not its salvation. To wit, they've not even begun to deal with bots/hacks and their response now is to incentivize PvE? Pfft. They're just stringing out their cash grab even further, trying to bleed y'all that much longer.

tl;dr: Find a better game to play, people. You deserve better than Roblox Pirate-flavored.