I said it before and I'll say it again: Sailors were an inherently flawed idea, and they will pretty much always be. The game simply has too many levels of abstraction to ever make sailors of any use.
First and foremost, ironically they achieve the opposite effect of what they are meant to achieve. The original point of sailors was to act as some sort of constraint on navy size and reinforcement in the same way that manpower is for armies. The problem, however, is that you were actually more limited in this regard under the old manpower-based system because manpower was relatively scarce, especially if you were fighting lots of wars, until the mid-to-late game. Thus you actually had to actually choose between land forces that offered actual fighting capacity or new ships and, moreover, you could find yourself unable to field all your ships effectively because your manpower simply couldn't keep up. With sailors being an actual thing, however, that is practically never an issue anymore because is it's own separate pool and there simply isn't enough naval warfare or attrition of naval personnel to make the system work with it's own pool unless you ridiculously nerf either pool size or pool recovery rate to the point that they are painful instead of fun or interesting.
Secondly, the system makes very little sense at a conceptual level. It's the same thing with all the people in the HoI forums requesting specific pilot pools. It makes no sense because it assumes that pilots, or in this case sailors, were some magical breed of untrainable ubermensch that just existed and no one but the specially chosen could do the job. The stark reality of the matter, however, is that the vast majority of sailors were just guys taken off the street and trained in how to sail. A guy from Bourgogne might have ended up in the French Navy simply because he joined or was conscripted into the navy or the merchant marine, but in EUIV, for some reason, only provinces that exist on the coast can produce these magical men of the sea. Sure, there were times of sailor constraints, but this is little different from how there were manpower constraints for the army, farming, production, etc. Practically speaking, in so far as EUIV is concerned, sailor shortages are only really worth noting during war-time when you don't necessarily have the time to train people how to be sailors (hence why impressment was a thing, and why it was very, very rare outside of war-time) - and even then, it can be argued that the cases where naval manpower were so thin and worn down that it was noteworthy are relatively few and far between. In short, this means that the cases for why we should add sailors are practically outliers.
But, some of you say: "What about as a fleet cap? What if we had ships have a monthly maintenance cost of sailors?" We already have a fleet cap, fleets already drain money, and if we are going to make them drain manpower...why not just make them drain actual manpower? And if we have to use sailors to constrain total fleet size like that, then we might as well just rebalance the fleet size calculation to begin with and fix that problem directly. It's a really roundabout way of going about limiting fleet size. Not only that, it would wreck the naval game as many small nations that fielded large navies such as Denmark, Portugal, and the Netherlands (as well as England and Castille too, unless they do some major expanding) would quickly find themselves unable to field even mid-sized navies because of their monthly sailor drain sucking away their sailors...oh, and it'll take forever to reinforce the navy that they do have. Either way the sailor is just another manpower pool and a largely unnecessary one because in the vast majority of cases there is no real reason to explicitly separate sailors from manpower. All it does is mean that idea slots that can be greatly useful +manpower ideas, or other, more useful ideas, become practically useless +sailor ideas that are only worth having in a small number of cases and make plus naval cap ideas worthless unless you
If we had to have another manpower pool, which I don't honestly even think we really need, I would infinitely prefer an officer manpower pool to sailors, because at least that would make sense. In the majority of case you can't just take a random joe off the street and make him an officer, there's far better reasons for them to be scarce and a separate pool (e.g. specialization, literacy, education, etc.) than there ever was for sailors. It would also mean that we could tie army performance to the officer corp kind of like what we had in HoI 3. The old manpower for navies system worked fine - the only real change I think it needs is a simple preference slider that would let me give either the land army, the navy, or neither (that is to say equal) reinforcement priority.
And if we instead want to make the navy worth worrying about, make them more interesting. Add actual fleet management and fleets composed of a variety of ships, not just heavies or, if you are in the Med until the late game, galleys. Better integrate foreign supply with naval mechanics. Better integrate trade with naval mechanics and control of sea lanes. You know, the actual things that navies did during the time period. Fleets would be vastly more interesting if instead of asking myself how many heavies I wanted to build, I asked myself what a proper balance of frigates, 4th rates, 3rd rates, 2nd rates, and 1st rates would be for my fleet.
tl;dr: Sailors make no logical, and very little historical, sense given the game's level of abstraction and only lead to sillyness. It also almost inherently achieves the opposite of what it sets out to do unless it's made so punishing that it's no fun and it cripples even the big naval nations - sure, some intensive amount of balancing might result in a usable system, but that's time wasted on a rather minor feature that adds very little when we already have a fleet cap and when the naval game would hugely benefit from naval and fleet mechanics, far more so than from sailors.
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