Until November 2022 they did care about realistic designs somewhat.
Friend, I have been involved with that game since the Closed Beta Test.
Trust me when I tell you wheels were were coming off the 'realism' selling point
long before that. Early on there were reasonable excuses but starting with the British battleship line in 2017 it became clear that WG was more than willing to throw realism aside for the sake of whatever gameplay concerns or particular line gimmick they wanted to be running with. Most of what is running around at tier IX and X is fake for all but a handful of navies, or at best heavily modified versions of designs that only existed on paper. The French have had this issue, the Italians suffer from it heavily, as has the American battleship split, a not inconsiderable number of German ships, and I haven't even checked through the Spanish or Dutch lines because I had stopped paying close attention to the game by that point (once upon a time I ran a series on the forum that actually tracked all this stuff).
WG has frequently made complete butcheries of design fittings, from likely AA armament to superstructure designs and fire control systems, and in fact have removed many of the older historically accurate configuration hulls from many of the tech tree ships. It wasn't great before 2019, but it only got worse since then.
If WG had pretended to care by the end of the decade even half as much as they did in the mid-2010s, I might have actually stuck with playing the game for a couple years longer.
And they fundamentally don't care. The game is about making money - which is fine by itself, such is the case with any product. But the problem here is that WG is motivated to create high tier products - it does not take a meaningfully greater amount of time and resources to model, develop, playtest, and release a tier X ship versus a tier V... but you can sell a tier X for 4.5x the price. And the high tier ships - especially tier IX and X - is where most of the fake ships are, because most navies never designed gun and torpedo based warships that can actually compete with the few real ships at that tier - ex,
Des Moines being vastly more powerful than any other gun based cruiser that entered service with any navy historically (and most did not even design cruisers that could compete with it), and likewise
Yamato being more powerful than even the most potent battleship designs considered by most navies.
This was less of an issue early in the game's history, because WG only ever had to worry about making a handful of fake ships - or heavy bastardizations of existing designs - to cap off tech trees. Because there were no premium ships past tier VIII. This kept things grounded for a while. Then they changed that, because they were following the money, and things steadily spiraled from there.
Trust me when I tell you that players have been banging on the historical accuracy drum for almost decade. WG has only cared less and less over time, because, to be perfectly frank - the people like us who care about it are a tiny minority. We're not the ones that keep the game alive. It's the average "I like this arcade ship game that lets me shoot ships in my ship" player who wants to scratch the ship itch the way they may want to scratch the tank itch or the plane itch, and gameplay will always matter more to them - and thus to WG - than the historical accuracy of their ships, so long as they see at least a few names they recognize. And when you really want to print money, do an anime collab. The people who cared about historical accuracy on the forums and subreddit were always a minority there, and the players actually using said forums and subreddit were always a small minority of the player base too. It just doesn't matter that much to WG, and it hasn't since very early on in the game's history.
I say this not to be mean spirited, but just as a warning. As someone who used to put in this kind of effort - it's not worth it, or at least not for WG & WoWs. All you will do is set yourself up for disappointment and burn yourself out - especially now that the game has been out for long enough that they've exhausted most of the major naval power's ability to provide new and distinctive ships to out into the game. The 'fake ships to keep selling content' will only continue to get worse, just as many of the minor nations or multinational nation tech trees and premiums of the 2020s were an escalation of this problem versus what was going on in the late 2010s (which already had many of us in an uproar then..
Players have been throwing line and ships suggestions out for a decade now. It has not stopped WG from doing what they've done.
I'll always encourage people to go and look into the lesser known designs of nations that never made it into service. They're fascinating. But do it because you're interested in learning more about them. Don't do it for World of Warships. Unfortunately, it's just futile.
