I feel like the main flaw with Open Crew right now is that so many players have different goals. When queueing into a game of Open Crew, you don't have any idea who's going to join you. While this is exciting and honestly kinda fun to me, it's not the greatest in practice to most people.
A simple improvement that could be made is when matchmaking for Open Crew, you can select 3 tags based on trading companies, PvP, Tall Tales, etc. The game will then put you on a ship and/or find crewmates with matching and/or similar tags.
This way, you can have a general of an idea who your crewmates will be and what you all are doing