Crew rating effects how responsive the AI is.
Unless it's changed, AI crews are rated from 0 being the poorest, to 4 being elite. It was pretty much established from Sh3 that crew ratings 0 and 1..well.. they just suck. Poorer then poor. On the same note, 4 is often, "too damn good". Most crew ratings you see in Sh3:GWX are 3's as i recall.
It's an easy fix. Wordpad is a great modding tool
. (So is winzip beleive it or not)