I used to really like and feel safe using the malbatross sail, enjoying that immediately immediately after I "close" it (pardon me for my failure to remember the correct term) the boat slowed down impressively, giving me time to lower my anchor and avoid the rocks that were in my way. This was quite essential to me, because in the rough and hazardous ocean biomes the anchor takes a while to touch the ground and stop the boat, and usually that time wasn't enough to prevent my boat from colliding at full speed with the aforementioned rocks and forcing me to repair it.
Now, with the new changes, the boat does not decrease its speed soon enough for it to be useful to me, and I keep crashing and crashing and crashing on sea objects. I'm so furstrated that I've started sailing with my anchor permanently down, at a miserable speed that makes the sailing experience as miserable as the Malbatross sail is useless.
I've seen in a video explaining (and showing) that driftwood oars became very fast (at the same time still looking safe), but I don't want to go around paddling my way around the sea, completely ignoring an item that used to be superior (a sail, even the standard sail, used to be better than oars), and relegating malbatross feathers, which are damn hard to obtain, to junk that i'll feed to lure plants (the malbatross quill float works just as efficiently as the dawn quill float, but requires more effort, and by the time I seek a malbatross for its feathers I usually already have enough dawn quill floats not to need any more for the rest of my game).
My suggestion is to bring back the slowing times of boats to how they were before, or in alternative to change the manoeuvrability of the malbatross sail and make it swifter at evading obstacles.