There's plenty of reasonable middle ground between "constantly evading relentlessly aggressive predators that ignore most attempts at distraction and cannot be damaged, discouraged, dodged or escaped or in a reasonable timeframe or with any measure of permanence" and "I want to kill every one of them until I become master of all the ocean" they just need to find it.

As a player I don't want wholesale murder either. I won't necessarily mind if that's an option, but I don't think that should be the focus. I just want more tools to deal with the situations that evolve, I don't want hammerheads camping my base and attacking my docked tadpoles with impunity, because once they fixate on it, they will never leave and there is no way to make them go away. I don't think having to move my base whenever one gets attracted is a reasonable ask. Perhaps it's even realistic and fits the game lore, but it's not fun. And fun needs to be the point. We need something to discourage and defend ourselves somehow, it doesn't have to be lethal or even harmful, it could even be friendly. Maybe the hammerheads love to eat a particular plant and if we grow it somewhere other than our base for long enough, they'll be attracted to wander over there and go eat it and maybe if they eat enough of it even fall asleep for awhile. There are so many possible options and I hope the devs actually understand that there is plenty of middle-ground to explore that are both non-violent and player-friendly. It doesn't have to be a chore of burning consumables and hypervigilance from risk of death to keep it engaging. People watch fish tanks for a reason. We want to see behaviors that make sense and be able to have some limited, mild influence on those behaviors both over the short and long terms, without necessarily having absolute control.