One thing you can't win with is water color. Because water color is entirely changeable with sun angle, water depth, stuff in the water, wave action, what kind of bottom is under the water, clouds....... the list doesn't end. I've seen green water, blue water, gray water, white water, water so clear boats look like they're levitating....no computer sim is going to reproduce that.
But there's no such thing as the correct water color. I've seen lots of TMO water, for instance. And I've seen water that was bright green. I propose that you might just throw your hands in the air and give us orange water with a disclaimer.
One piece of advice. Don't do what Ducimus did. He started out with a true vision, which was his own. But he listened too much. He came up with what I called "Duci's evil airplanes" which could see you at periscope depth sometimes. They were genius and they were reality. But people complained so much he eliminated them. RSRD destroyed them too. He kept changing the AI all over the place as different people yelled louder and toward the end he had no vision at all. It was all complainers' ideas and I think the mod was much better at about 1.7 than it ended up at 2.5. Listen to people but keep your vision. Not everybody has to love your mod. If someone has something to say, you look into it and agree then it becomes part of your vision, go with it. But please, no changes unless they're YOUR changes.