It's not really necessary to blow his request completely out of proportion. A little more realism is always nice. I wouldn't have thought it needed saying, but nobody is asking for 100% realism.

That said, I don't see it as something worth implementing, though I had a similar idea on my own while playing. It would be nice if ships randomly burned and/or listed for a while after the game registered them as "sunk" -- it could even cause smoke plumes that would serve to confuse BBs who are trying to spot enemy ships through the fog of war. Is that a burning wreck, or a still-capable battleship with a deck fire? Right now in NF, every smoke plume in the fog of war is attached to a valid target. With burning wrecks, you'd need to make a decision on whether to use another salvo to ensure that the smoke plume you saw doesn't still have a functioning ship underneath of it.

However, there's a few things that need to be balanced when making this sort of decision. Gameplay is important, realism is nice, but they need to be weighed against the potential for performance hits and how much development time they'll take. Adding more variety or duration to sinking ships would not be enough of an improvement to justify itself, in my opinion. (And yes, not everyone would even agree that the change would be an improvement even if it had no performance hit and required no dev time.)

This

Though it would be interesting :D

Actually the sprites for the sinking process already exist for every single ship in-game. All SDE will have to do is slow the framerate of the sinking images during the sinking process. In other words, the sinking process might even cause less lag, because your PC will no longer need to load up multiple images in less then a second to give you the ship sinking effect.

It's not a bad idea, but I don't see SDE implementing something like this any time soon.

not even more sprites, just make the current sprites move slower, like half the frame rate.