A Ship of the Damned solution that doesn't involve just removing them

[Stone 0]

I think the ships are fine and before you submit me to a hanging, hear me out. The ships are fine if avoidable. By this, I mean the ships should have predictable spawns and predictable spawn locations. The way I see it, there are two scenarios in which this work.

SCENARIO NUMERO ONE:
The Ships of the Damned only spawn in the Central Maw or The Golden Age Ruins servers. This makes them slightly more difficult but at least predictable on where they are spawning. This allows the one guy who is simply manning his one man sloop to do resource runs or small trades in his region or a small area surrounding it possible. It benefits those who risk going through the locations and does not hurt those who avoid it.

SCENARIO NUMERO TWO:
A new addition to the game. How we find maps in a bottle, we can find notes in a bottle. These notes will lead us or be a simple riddle to lead us to a square upwards of 5-6 tiles away at times and lead us to a more specific coordinate location. What is this note leading us to? A sunken NPC ship. This ship will provide TONs of gold but comes with trouble. Depending on the rarity of the note, before even diving down to look at the ship you must take out 1-3 Damned Ships. Then, while deep under what you must fight off various other ocean dwellers and Damned creature. This will bring great fortune, upwards of 2,500-3,000 gold and only the rarest of the Blueprints.

I believe this scenario let's the devs keep them in game but also allows for predictability in them. You can avoid them at the cost of either slightly longer travel times or if you wish for great loot. I think the problem is not how many or how strong they are, it's that you cannot predict when they are going to  spawn, which direction they go in etc. They attack even sloops which cannot defend themselves and so on. It's a joke to have RNG like that, especially in a game where people want to die to other people, not NPCs or simply just trade and have fun. Not having to worry about their little old sloop. I've seen the solution of basing their aggro range off the type of ship but that won't work either. What happens when someone hires a crew and is one manning a Galleon? It'll still be difficult even for him to maintain such a vessel but shit like NPC ships with aimbot are not going to help.