after years of owning it, i finally took the time to take a look... i wish i hadnt.
PR 3 continues the dumbing down of player agency and control that PR 2 already started compared to the opriginal OG PR back in the day:

combat controls are simplistic and lacking. you control one ship actively and the other 2 have default ai behaviour. you cant control your ship speed in combat anymore, only enter boarding mode which makes you slower, but cant shoot cannons while that is active. and boarding happpens via a timer, if your ship is too fast you leave the boarding area and have to circle around again.
Yes you are right: this sounds and plays very much like a suzper simple control scheme made for touch screens.
but hey now every tree in the city screen has its own shadow, as well as all the ant sized citizens..

overall the game is shoddily stiched together, large parts of the tutorial missions that supposedly explain the game mechanics dont even align with factual in game information, desiganations and so own (for example a tutorial mission will tell you to activate a specific default trade route, but the name given doesnt match the avaible default routes, probably lost in translation)

bugs, bugs, bugs small and big.

find some cargo as floatsome, automatically picks it up without asking. oh it was much more than my cargo even if i was empty. sail into a town, game wont let me leave the town agai, because my convoy is overloaded.
shoddy, loveless , careless.

again like in PR 2 ship combat is only done as convoys, because enemies, even traders, have at least 1 escort and 1 trader, so you need to be strong enough to defeat 2 ships and then board at least one of them.
there is no small time pirateering here, just like in PR 2 you need to already be financiall ysecure before you can even remotely manage the sailor costs and ships costs for fighting. at which point you probably are also already rich enough to just brute force it with the auto combat option and skip the tedious, boring combat altogether.

about to uninstall... man i wish i could play PR 1 again...that was the best of them all, the guys at kalypso either dont care or dont know what they are doing...

The first few hours it feels like a spreadsheet. Moving from one town to another and buy/sell resources. Then a pirate kills you - you start from a save. And Again and again.
You cannot kill pirates - they are always stronger that you. You can try manual combat but it is so time consuming that you want to avoid it.
Check Sid Mayers Pirates - this is one I played several times.
Perhaps I will try this game in a year and see if it is the same. For now - uninstall after spending a day on it.