Why do ships have such low potency?

Ship stats are like evenly spread out based on the crew power from their crew, so they get even potency/tenacity boosts and when you start out with 15% tenacity and 0% potency, the ships always have 15% more tenacity than they have potency. Basically you need to have much higher overall stats to land anything even remotely reliably other than the irresistible effects. It's honestly really annoying, because for some reason the enemy ships always seem to land things even when their potency is lower than my tenacity as well.