I believe things would be fixed if AoE was reduced to the smallest necessary minimum to prevent more than one ship getting hit by it (the longest ship is 1250M, so the distance to the center of the model is 625M if you fire and hit something at the very nose and the very butt of the Ishtar/old Marduk), and all NPC battleships should get rid of Commander/Captain/Admiral drops and have all the same amount of cash cards instead.
Unpopular opinion: Spamming hurricanes at idiotic NPCs should not be more profitable than the chore that is trading, because otherwise everyone will stop trading and go for the fun thing instead, arguing that people will be more likely to group up and fight five Hurricane Legates in Xi than logging a lone bomber with torpedos to kill juicy freighter-shielded armorless defenseless transports.
That being said, I am not sure anymore what the current issue regarding AoE and hitboxes of multi-hitbox-ships like the vanilla battleships is - some say it's fixed, some say it's not.