This game is objectively a pretty casual game, with the ability to drop-in/drop-out of crews at any time and no vertical progression leveling or powerups so I don't understand the constant need to make everything take forever. It comes off as a very superficial way of stretching the available content out to make it seem like more, but all it does is increase the tedium.
Every trading company's available voyages should always have a shorter option that can be completed within 20-30 minutes, [Mod edited] As you level up in the trading company, it becomes harder and harder to complete an entire voyage in shorter play times.
The skull forts and skeleton ships should have no waves. Populate the entire fort, add some doors that must be taken down to prevent people from rushing the loot room and have the captain available to fight right from the start. The skeleton ships should only have a single wave. Take them down, collect the loot and move on. Doing wave after wave of the same enemy is not interesting in the least and it takes way too much prep time to even bother with. Adjust the loot to an appropriate level if you must, but I think you would see a lot more people doing these sidequests if the prep time was reduced and they would be a lot more fun. It may also even create more of a rush to get to these areas by other players since they know its not going to take an hour to complete it - more player encounters! If you want to go even farther, reduce the number of waves on the OoS voyages. Spend more time making smarter AI or different enemy types instead. Less is more in this regard.
Even the new area has built in time wasters and it gets annoying. Volcanoes are erupting way too often, and the entire area design is meant to prolong the time it takes to do voyages in this region.
This game has an identity crisis. It wants to be a fun, casual game you play with your friends but also wants to contain the grindiest time wasting activities from old MMOs. The intensely shallow and repetitive nature of the voyage system would be a lot less noticeable if we could cycle through activities a lot quicker.