Since I am an obedient and well behaved kind of a guy...
I'll start off by reinforcing what's been said by many elsewhere:
Devastating rakes.
It could be argued that even ridiculously well angled, aimed and timed rakes aren't devastating enough to enable 1 vs 2-3. Things have gotten better with the penalties of low crew. We discussed raking gun loss earlier, that sure would help. I've tried my best with gun loss, but I'm no programmer. I wouldn't know if you could slap a multiplier on balls coming from a given stern sector of a ship, nor if we want that? It could get gamey real fast.
Crew loss penalties could be tweaked too. If your frigate has lost 100 guys and you stay in gunnery focus, maybe we could increase yard speed penalties?
Rudder "shock".
How would increased down time for damaged rudder work? Maybe make damaged rudder due to damage of the actual rudder "blade" take longer to fix than damage to the other parts? I can't tell if this is a good idea, tho.