No, I totally understand the point. You have to sail a distance in a vanilla boat to rank up – but it wouldn’t take long to change that line in the configs and update the website. Just because it has been that way a long time doesn’t mean it can’t change.

That may be the case, but on a server which based on ships and piracy, shouldn’t there be a bias towards making ships useful? This isn’t a drastic change like removing TP (or walking), but it would go a long way to making the use of plugin ships a significant part of gameplay.