Ishtar

Not a fan of Rule the Wave's battle generator mechanics, I'd rather something like total war with an abstracted convoy escort/submarine system

The Tillman battleships are smaller than the Yamato hull we already have in game anyways, and with the 90,000 ton limit in Rule the Waves their presence was only hindered by lack of sextuple turrets (doesn't stop the 7x quad turrets from surpassing it anyways)

personally I find radar masts ugly and naval warfare past 1955 or so incredibly boring, maybe RTW2 will change my mind when it reaches that stage

You fundamentally misunderstand the motivation, core design, and intended playerbase of this game. You're judging it from an alpha state without the main selling feature, the campaign, and calling it lame. It's basically as if someone played WoWS and stopped at tier 2 because there were no battleships.

Whatever they are, imo they shouldn't be permanent and be affected by your decisions or random chance throughout the game. Passives to research for example should be flexible by mid and late game to reflect the experiences of the nation and the desires of the admiral, ie make more torpedo runs and get better torpedo technology.

Turret rotation is already possible, press R

I assume submarine torpedoes are even weaker than destroyer torpedoes. You're not discussing engagement, you're discussing damage.

Graphical improvements would be a nice polishing feature, but I mostly want the damaged textures to be reworked. It would look much better as dents/explosion marks than just a uniform gray skin with clear lines. The hits don't have to be realistic, I just don't want to see that clear border between damaged and clean.

On the topic of Surigao Strait, Fuso never even made it to the American battleline and succumbed to two torpedoes, probably on account of her old age. If we're interested in ship sinkings in the era of this game, 22 September 1914 saw the sinking of three armored cruisers from 1-2 torpedoes each fired from a single submarine. Predreadnought Pommern took one to two torpedoes and sank, a French armored cruiser took two submarine torpedoes and sank, predreadnought Suffren sank from a magazine hit, armored cruiser Pallada sank from a magazine hit, predreadnought Goliath capsized from two torpedo hits, predreadnought Formidable sank from flooding from two torpedo hits (though the first set her low in the water and caused an abandon ship order), and an Ottoman predreadnought sank from a single torpedo hit. It seems to be that torpedoes are primarily limited by the extremely effective bulkhead system when in reality their ability to cause progressive flooding doomed ships that didn't immediately sink. If ships in UAD didn't stop flooding after a single compartment, the torpedo modeling would be much more accurate without needing to increase the damage of torpedoes.

Washington fired slightly more than 1.5 rounds/minute at Kirishima

The accuracy issue in my opinion primarily comes from bundling it all together as one accuracy stat rather than separating it into precision and accuracy. Even radar FCS can't magically fix mechanical accuracy inherent in guns, but at 15km a high tech battleship will land the majority of its shells on a battleship. This is also evident in close range low tech battles where shells are going 10 degrees apart from each other despite being fired from parallel guns in the same turret. Mechanical precision and accuracy should be separated so we don't get those wonky close range scatters that are physically impossible.

I realize that many aspects of realism would have to be sacrificed for the sake of gameplay, but personally I think guns should just have realistic rates of fire as a maximum with modifications (mostly negative) to the final RoF. The nature of dreadnought warfare from Jutland involved quick firing guns at long distances rather than the strange close range maneuver warfare with long reloads we currently have. In exchange, long range gunnery should receive a nerf to accuracy and all guns should have a nerf to damage. It seems rather rushed that 6 shells of 16" will sink a 30,000 ton battleship (or drop its structure to red) when even old warships like the Kirishima took 20 shells from the Washington and took a few hours to sink. This would place the emphasis on long range gunnery and strive closer to what I see as a more realistic model. Visibility range should also increase as a result I understand that modifications like autoloaders do increase reloads to near historical values, but the prospect of an autoloader on a battleship seems far fetched.

Will penetration values be based solely on realistic calculations, or will there be an element of game play balance thrown in there? Guns are certainly more effective now, but they still only have 2/3rds of their real life penetration values if we treat German KC n/A as equivalent to the final tier of armor.

Washington was making 1.5 salvos a minute at Guadalcanal, so that isn't true at all

I very much doubt any nation on earth could build a battleship armored in 18 g/cm3 steel, these extremes aren't really relevant. The British for example denoted their armor in pounds rather than milimeters/inches, suggesting that the differences in density weren't exceeding manufacturing flaws. This is irrelevant when the game does the same thing. Changing the Resistance value (which is stated in the help menu to denote slope design) has no effect on penetration, nor does changing armor quality. This means we're basically shooting 18" guns that penetrate 26.5" of Iron armor at 1km.