[Pisces]

First, whether you find anything depends on where you are looking. As in, what patrol location, in the middle of the atlantic, or nearer to land? Did you ever submerge to listen with your hydrophone in such bad weather? Did you look on the map often enough for 'silent' contact reports that appear. Convoys come with radio messages, but single units don't. Intercept them also! Did you keep your crew (including officer) on watch?

And maximum TC values might even have caused your lonely days. High TC values increases the distance a unit moved before a 'vicinity' check is done. In a matter of speaking, it might have 'jumped over' your 3d -bubble, instead of inside of it.

As for the weather, afaik the weather fix was allready built-into GWX 3. (even 2.x) The limitation of the fix however was when the player saved and reloaded his games frequently. A certain number of days (which I can't remember unfortunately) must pass before the 'change weather' timer kicks in. If saved too soon the timer gets reset at the next reload. That's a SH3 bug, not GWX's fault.

And yeah, GWX is about as much realism as is possible. Boredom was the most performed past-time during the real thing aswel.

Oh yeah, in the end it ALLWAYS depends on what you did with the campaign file mods. I.E enabling the Black Sea mod or Indian Ocean mod has no point if you are only sailing around in the atlantic. If you did enable either of them (even if enabled after enabling the merged campaign mod) then the Atlantic is simply devoid of any traffic. Only enable the area where you are playing (atlantic is default ofcourse) or just enable the merged campaign if you started a patrol to transit to the other area. Not all of them at the same time.