The dev philosophy has shifted towards complexity and interaction, world of warships style movement, from a fun based arcade game on caps.
You don't see casual organic encounters anymore on big ships, it's just pre-agreed raids and events.
EDIT: The metrics speak for themselves, indie cap prefixes on tracker used to always be at the top, now look where they are - update after update lowers the enjoyment of playing caps casually.
The only thing that could be done is Haste being replaced as dev lead by someone with philosophy geared towards fun and casuals again, but that's not happening any time soon, and the game might be too old and unpopular to get someone who'd care enough to make the changes after he's gone - we are down to 3 admins, this might be the end of the line, and the people who played because of having casual fun on big ships have moved on anyways and might not even return even if you do shift cap design towards them (us) again.
