Ok so, Gunpowder barrels are a very useful tool lets not lie to ourselves me and my mighty crew of the saucy sue are guilty of using them to sink other ships, and im sure you who is reading this are guilty of it to. Its without a doubt the most efficient way to sink and enemy ship, However is this healthy for the game? with the recent nerf to the blunderbuss rare clearly does not want their to be 1 sure fire solution to win in a combat situation but right now that is precisely what the explosive barrel is. Yes an organised crew can deal with the damage a barrel gives off but if all 4 of them are just caught on the edge of the blast that ship is going down.
An example i can give is when me and my friends where doing a skeleton fort about a week ago we kept sinking the same galleon with cannon fire (Keep in mind this is before the ship re-spawns where fixed) and no matter how many times we proved to be the better crew with cannons blazing they kept coming back with explosive barrels and blowing many holes into our ship, sure we always battled them off and repaired the holes but we had more then a few close calls. If we hadent maxed out supplies before the fort we would have surely gone down and its a shame because we proved several times by sinking them we where the more well oiled machine of a crew when it came to ship to ship combat, It sort of makes gunpowder barrels feel very cheap and when your ship is hit by one you dont say to yourself "Wow that other crew are pretty good, they got us" you just say to yourself "Well thats not fair, we beat them and now they can screw us with a gunpowder barrel." it sort of feels like the gunpowder barrels are a low skill opportunity for players to win ship battles because lets be honest, you can be the most well oiled machine of a crew on the waves but that does not mean you cant be unlucky. If all 4 of you just happen to be caught in that blast your ships done.
While im no game designer so i wouldn't even presume to suggest what rare could do to these barrels i think they have to do something, As shown in a video produced by Force Gaming the gunpowder barrel will always punch 4 holes in a ship when it explodes, maybe reduce that from 4 to 2? i dunno i dont think they should nerf the barrels into the ground so they become unusable i think they should still be a viable option but right now it seams like people dont even care about engaging with cannons anymore they just go for the strat of ram enemy ship, run off the bow with gunpowder barrel, blow self and enemy crew up, re-spawn and claim all their treasure as their ship goes down, repeat.
TLDR: Gunpowder barrels in their current form arn't healthy for the game.