Mostly I have to agree with LeeVanSpliff. Eyecandy stuff like what crewmembers are on duty where, dive plane animation, periscope animation in the conning tower (people about committed hari kari over that one!), volumetric fog follies and the like are irrelevent to gameplay. They are the inconsequential window dressing to what makes the game work. We accept "rudder...rudder" and panicked damage reports on loading the game also as inconsequential problems. If they are fixed, we will be happy. If not, we will ignore them because they do not ruin gameplay.
As far as CTDs, that is something you chould not be seeing. My last CTD was last year after I accidentally uninstalled some mods in a different order than I loaded them. That is the normal experience with the game.
Trigger Maru is a mod to make the game more challenging, not a realism mod. Escorts are going to find you because they have superman on board. They will make pretty scary runs on you without doing much or sometimes any pinging. They are NOT invincible. Their purpose is to produce fear, an accurate simulation of the feelings of the real particpants in WWII. Sometimes to produce accurate simulation in player behavior, inaccurate enemy behavior is necessary. Idea stolen from tater.
Now you might not like that at all. I say do what I did: squealed like a stuck pig, called Ducimus some impolite names, lived with the mod for a couple of weeks and fell in love with Trigger Maru. If you don't get the desired effect, switch to the equally excellent Real Fleet Boat and all that objectionable escort behavior will vanish like magic.
Torpedoes: in TM, torpedoes are better than they were in real life.LukeFF is preparing a special place in hell for you by modeling the actual characteristics of the real torpedoes. Hint: one real submarine disabled a huge Japanese tanker with his first shot. Then with the tanker dead in the water, he proceeded to shoot his entire inventory of 18 torpedoes without a miss, but also without a single explosion. Running deep was a given, usually on the order of 10' or so too deep. It seems the depth was calibrated with a warhead filled with water instead of explosive. Cheaper that way you know. But the heavier real warhead overpowered the trim vanes, causing the torpedo to undercorrect. Oops.
The TDC also works considerably better than it did in real life because you have accurate recognition manual info on every ship in the game. Well that will change too, as Real Fleet Boat gets the actual information given to the real boats. No longer will you find every ship in the manual. No longer will the information you are lucky enough to find be reliable. Actually, you're in big trouble, as were the real captains. I'm thinking that torpedoes that miss their targets probably don't sink them.
I wouldn't bring it up, but you mentioned being awed by GWX. The central organizing principle of the U-Boats was the wolfpack. Where are the wolfpacks that were at the center of just about every command decision made in a U-Boat? They are not there. So did Kapt Lehmann and crew throw up their hands in dispair, or continue, ignoring the fault, to make the best U-Boat they could? I submit that that omission in SH3 is more crippling than any or all of the faults in SH4. And look at what they accomplished in spite of that unfixable problem. You are awed.
We've all been over this ground before. We fix what we can and ignore the rest. Then we have a great time in the best two sub simulators on the planet Earth. What else is there to say?