Despite being a longtime follower and admirer of Sea of Thieves, I only recently started playing... I love the simplicity across the game, and that includes the progression system!
One thing though, I'd love to see commendations that are not visibly locked... things you can do, but you wouldn't know it until you did it. For one, this makes it feel more like discovery than checking a task off of a checklist.
The best example I can think of is the Flames of Fate. While it's very cool, it would have been neat to let players discover... The moment you discover you can get a different color light from the Well of Fates would be like "WHAT?!?" and then immediately you start wondering why... And then discovering if you light a beacon with this color, you get a commendation. Players would be wondering what else these colors might mean!
It gives players a mystery to solve, at least for a short while until it's discovered and posted on the forums. But as you can see from the WoW Secret Finders, this is something that really can bring a community together and seems to fit will with Rare's social/interaction goals... and those of making players the center of the story.
If Rare could design these types of things into the future of Sea of Thieves, I wouldn't say no :)
