I don't know about Rare's data, but from my impressions Fishing is really polarising content. Either you're spending hours of play without doing it once, or you're spending an entire session on it.
To an extent this is fine, but I think the level to which most of the playerbase doesn't fish is too severe. I have my own thoughts on how that could be solved by changing Fishing directly (the short version: basic fish should struggle less so they're very quick catches) but here's an alternative: Fishnets!
These fishnets are rope nets with a rope line and weights, and must be found through dynamic looting of islands. There's no way to target finding them, they're just a passive reward from exploration, and they can appear on all manner of Islands, including being tucked away in Outposts or at Seaports.
Fishnets are carried like Tridents or etc. Holding the primary action button spins them, before throwing upon release. When they hit water, after a short delay they are retracted, and there's a fish within them! From there, you can take the fish, and the net is destroyed.
Fishnets use the same fishing criteria as Fishing Rods with the exception of bait rules, which are completely ignored. This means using one in a storm means you could get a Stormfish, for example, but you could also get Treacherous Plunder.
The purpose of this is to allow players who aren't taking out their rods to still get some fish simply by playing the game more passively. Actually fishing will still get you fish 100x faster than with Fishnets because of how limited they are, but the Fishnets posing an opportunity to the player specifically combined with almost no time investment required to use one will mean it should help players engage in fishing more in general and make The Hunter's Call content fit into the game more organically, instead of just being your Mermaid Gem dropoff as it is for many players.
