This sounds like an absolute hellish nightmare of code and race conditions should we even try to implement it.

I'm also not sure I necessarily agree with adding more complexity to ship gameplay

You know complex gameplay isn't necessarily bad. It provides better opportunities and is less repetitive.

Often the positive elements of movecraft have been deemed complicated at first such as the drifting.

This in itself doesn't actually make combat harder, it just removes pretty scummy and unfun tactics. A lot of the fun in movecraft is often drowned out by these sorts of things. Unfortunately this is so severe it makes a lot of strategies impossible, makes larger ships sitting ducks and quite literally encourages players to play at a range where bugs occur. While yes you wouldn't be able to execute monkey brain level of tactics as easy, it wouldn't exactly turn CCnet into ultimate Admiral (which it should aim for XD).

Most importantly it's so unfun, and has been holding the server back (in terms of gameplay enjoyment).

I can't comment on the code, but I think it's severe enough to make it a key focus whenever the coders and staff are more free. I appreciate it's not easy.

It's not like movecraft is at all complicated. It's pretty simple, the only difficulty is the turrets in my opinion. Once you have the basics down (takes about an hourish to learn) it just turns into honing your craft.

Same with design, I think although there are some better designs as of now. Given the level of espionage and law of diminishing returns the top 5 nations are probably very close. This is no longer like early and mid movecraft periods where designs constituted wins or losses. The only big thing right now is how shotgun ships can pretty much flatter anything.

What might be better than pushing would be to have ships damage each other when ramming. Bigger the ship the less damage you take from doing this. Probly alot easier to code as well.

That would work but it would have to be severe so destroyers and cruisers wouldn't even consider attempting to block.

Couple things:
1. Illyt, to be fair, blocking a ship should be extreme in the first place. IRL, boxing a ship doesn't involve literal walls of ships, it involves a ship not being able to cross a certain area without shells being rained on them.
2. While I do actually like the idea of ram damage, as it was and is actually pretty commonly used IRL (attacking of Graff Spee, HMS Dreadnought ramming a German U-Boat, Chinese currently making ramming moves toward American and Filipino ships as intimidation), there is also the issue of range. Unlike World of Warships, where ramming can be devastating and viable, ships in CCNet aren't fighting at distances of 8-10 kilometers. Two dreadnoughts can collide in render-distance range in seconds, even faster for smaller ships. This poses a serious dilemma, as ramming is an interesting and very realistic strategy, but current render distances mean ships would be constantly ramming into each other, upturning the current meta massively and creating warfare entirely based around ramming seeing as ships aren't far enough away from each other to drive away/sink an enemy ship before they try to ram.

trireme combat when??

Perhaps take a fraction of hull from both ships when they have been in contact for more than, lets say 4 seconds? So they can't just 'box' you in