Perhaps the voyage and treasure system should be changed.
How about completing the voyages, solving the riddles, killing the captains, and finding the treasure gives you the rep, and turning in the treasures gives you the gold?At least you'd have something already if a crew steals all your stuff, and would stop the soul crushing defeat of playing for hours to come up empty handed when a crew hunts you down or out pvps you.
Separate the two. Right now treasure turn in gives you everything and when players see a ship they are like GO GO GO! GET GET GET! But what most players I've played with want is that juicy rep right now for unlocks. PVPers would think 'is the battle worth it just for some gold they may or may not have'?
I think it might also slow down the skeleforts being the best thing in the game right now and the toxic battles around them. Yea sure they could reward a lot of gold but nothing else.
The flip side of this is it would MAKE players actually do the voyages for rep, and some don't want to do those because they are boring or time consuming. What makes you a pirate legend? Farming skeleforts all day and server hopping, or doing all the voyages?