Ahoy there! Long-time player coming back from hiatus for the captaincy update here. Had a small suggestion/request for the team as they're assessing how milestones work if they plan on making changes:
Could we loosen the requirements for the lower-tier trinkets? I understand that milestones are meant to take a long time and be a sort of end-game grind for high-end players, but right now it feels like large parts of Captaincy are locked out to more casual players. I was looking over a portrait to commemorate a strangely docile snake that we brought aboard years ago that turned traitor on us at the worst possible moment, and I was dismayed to realize I'd have to turn in 100 merchant voyages to unlock even the most basic version of this trinket. I get two, maybe three voyages of any kind done per night, so this requirement feels pretty out of reach for me, and there's a lot of similar requirements for other trinkets, so it ends up feeling like I'm only going to have default trinkets available... basically indefinitely, which is disappointing, especially given that I not only have history with this game, I've got genuine stories that I want to commemorate on the boat and trinkets I can see that actually do that job.
So, my proposal: I don't need the overall grind to be easier, I just want to be able to tell the story of my boat with the most modest version of a trinket more easily. Rather than needing to reach "class 10" in a given milestone, which I'm taking to mean I need to accomplish it 10 times, I'd like to see the lowest-end version of a bunch of trinkets unlock when you reach "class 1" in a milestone instead. I think we'd see a lot more variety in captained vessels and it would allow me and many others to enjoy one of the meatier parts of the captaincy update much sooner.