@nofears-fun there are no crates of cursed cannonballs and there will never be crates for alternative resources if the design of these crates if for them to be found at random, only by changing that fundamental aspect you could expect players to have an alternative way of story special resources, as it stands 300 is a number nobody will ever reach by playing even for 12 hours straight, only by having the most insurmaountable amount of decdication, similar to gathering 500+ treasure. If players want to do that, let them, don't limit them in their choise, if there is no alternative way of storing these special resources, you cannot punish players for finding these by having their inventory limited to the number of players in the crew, you obviously give an advantage to 4 player crews. Aka "I don't think we should be allowed to store them at all. What you carry should be your limitation on CCB's." is the dumbest system you could have proposed.
What I proposed is not an opinion, everything I say is either a fact or true, it's only an opinion when I state otherwise, 300 is the maximum amount of any type of anything any ship should store, no storage of any item should ever be less than 100, this keeps the resource management part of sea of thieves in a confortable position that it can work to allow the devs to easily tweak and balance resource gathering rates, as well as inventory management for future items. The current system allows for around 3600 cannonballs to be stored of any type the player wants, the player can choose what type he wants to hoard the most, so theoretically a player in this system could have 1200 anchor balls, 1200 regular cannonballs and 1200 peace balls, nobody is ever going to get that many, but the possibility is there, in a way is oddly fitting, but considering that they may or may not introduce new cannonballs in forsaken shores, its another thing fighting for space.
One thing I'll say is that my system is probably not what the devs intend for inventory management to be, I want players to have access to all reasources and be rewarded for gathering them in large quantities, perhaps the devs intend for dillemas where players choose to store some resources over others, which is fine, but as I mentioned before, 100 should always be the minimum.
As per usual, crates of cannonballs are the variable, it doesn't matter if you find them or don't, they exist, so your anectote is irrelevant. The whole thing with 3600 becomes completely botched when you consider a player can choose to store regular cannonballs in crates instead of the barrels, it opens up 3 more slots or even more, so in theory we are back at the beggining. It's better to work around these system already in place than having to botch new ways of limiting player freedom. CCB aren't as strong as people say they are and they also aren't as common, all player status effects have firendly fire, only 2 ship status effects are relevant in pvp, the way pvp battles take place is still mostly unchanged, only the aproach and the initial engagement have been shaken up, if you lost a fight to cursed cannonballs you probably most likely would have lost without them being used in the fight, being paranoid and thinking that giving players large storages would break the game is a myth.
I hope this allows you to understand why I'm always right.