Larger ships are not controlled with wheel menus if you are manning them properly with NPC crew. All the controls are at your fingertips much like the other examples brought up in this thread.
On anything larger than a raft, if you assign NPC crewmates to the sails and guns, the captain can control everything on the ship using WASD and other keys while on the wheel of the ship. Very much like AC: Black Flag.
The main reason ATLAS is 100 GB (other than the massive scope of the content and the large number of terrains) is that the textures are 4k resolution. In ARK they were 2k.
Ultimately we'd like to separate the 4k textures into an HD texture pack, but it's faster for Early Access iteration to keep it as a single build for now.
Clearly the ARK Devs still havent optimized or learned how to compress anything, their new re-skinned game is just as massive as Ark.
I bet undermeshing and duping are still a thing in this game. They never could figure out how to fix those problems in ark in 3 years.