I've played Age of Pirates using the "Supermod" (Which is the large mod mentioned by Reaves), infact I highly recommend playing with this mod, even though the game still has a long way to go.
The game is still very buggy even with the latest 1.5 patch (Which is incorporated by the Supermod), some features still aren't there...you can't marry for instance.
In addition, there's actually no point to upgrading your Settlement's defenses. This is because the AI is so weak that even a single enemy ship can capture your entire colony of say..1650 people.
There are also other annoying bugs, such as your ship getting flooded with 1000000 planks when you use the "Take all" option from an enemy ship. Friendly ship AI is also fairly weak.
On a positive note, the graphics are fairly good...the sea is realistically simulated, although some aspects of the game seem to be false, for example Upgrading your ships with copper plating is supposed to make them go fast, but in AOP it actually slows them down
.
The keys in AOP also need to be remapped, by Default a few of them are unmapped.
** I suggest downloading the POTC Build 13 mod , which improves the original Pirates of the Caribbean a ton, Build 14 is still in beta and unstable, suggest you skip that**.
The modding community for Age of Pirates is comparatively dormant compared to that of POTC, so don't expect anything special for a year or two.
So Rose, to answer your question : Is AOP better than POTC? Well, AOP is still very buggy, it doesn't function the way it's supposed to, so POTC is slightly better.
POTC plus the Build 13 mod.... now that's a different story, POTC wins hands down here and AOP + Supermod is nowhere close.