Awards and promotions, what's your approach?

[Damo]

So, it occurred to me that when trying to make your way through a career it's complicated enough without having to oversee your crews' advancement. If you choose to follow the game's system you end up with crew members with loads more experience than their rank limits and not enough promotion opportunities and handing out one skill per patrol isn't enough. Also, some of the medals, i.e. Front Clasp were not available early war yet the game awards them from the start.

On the other hand, you can use SH3Commander to manage your crew but here is the possibility of going overboard (no pun intended) and giving out too many promotions and medals making your crew super duper uber in a few patrols, although the historic availability of medals is solved.

So what's a happy medium? How were promotions handled historically? Were they readily given out to well performing sailors (in this case those that go say, 50 points over their rank limit)? Or was BdU a bit tight with them, only giving them out for those that proved meritous?

How do you manage promotions? Do you have a system, a formula? Do you base your award system on your patrol performance using SH3Commander. Also, personal promotions are too easily achieved and I know I saw a post about editing the reward values depending on tonnage but can't find it. Would be nice to read your takes on what you edit in the system files and what system you use for promotion that makes your crew realistically capable and advance historically. I want to overhaul my crew management before I start a new career.