Just thought I'd pop back in to confirm for anyone who still hasn't fully appreciated this little fact:
Patches are your friends.
Nice to see the 1.4 patch does indeed give me harbour layouts on the maps; solves the annoyance of trying to deal with port navigation at night.. And together with a minor tweak in the .cfg file so that the max time rate isn't such a pain, life's become a breeze.
Thanks again for the welcome. Happy sailing, all.