So you make a claim and then immediately abandon it, and then throw out another non sequitur.

You really gonna pretend that the actual mechanics of the games bear no similarity, beyond aesthetics and theme?

In both, you are a captain of a pirate ship, who engages in pirate ship battles, for booty, to build up your base and ship and crew into a better or different ship with better or different capabilities.

In Windrose, you're an actual person as an avatar, and can meaningfully engage in the world, mechanically, as a human... in S&B, you are the ship, your character as a human does not actually exist for gameplay purposes, they're a customizable ornament for cutscenes and small explorable areas.

Theres the similarities and differences between a survival sandbox based around ships, and a mobile game based around ships, where the theme for both is pirates.

In the mobile game framework, there's much less variety of gameplay, much of it is abstracted into extremely simplified mechanics, or just menus and cutscenes, mini walking simulator zones.

I'd argue that most people were expecting S&B to be essentially Black Flag, but multiplayer.

You know, you're a person, who moves and jumps and fights and such.

Survival sandbox is a reasonable extrapolation of that.

Totally abstracting the human avatar into not actually being part of the game's mechanics... is not a reasonable expectation of an expansion of a game where you are an assassin who also controls and fights on ships.