The ship scan thing can be a problem, but as for them outrunning you, it's
because they look for and use tradelanes most of the time.

yeah but when im sailing around the world, its not like i have a GPS that
tells me hey d00d, we are close to (insert tradelane here) lets go sail
towards it cause its faster. when we are chasing after ships all we have is
the compass saying x,y and to go in that direction. yeah im frustrated the NPC
gets to use cheat codes and if i want to chase it i have to slowly SLOWLY
pursue it and hope that its captain goes shit, we are going to fast and too
far east, we ebtter change course to randomly sail around in a circle and hope
that asshole in the other ship catches up to us. but lets not worry, cause if
he catches up to us and lags a round and doesnt ship scan in time, it wont get
our license plate so we can make a clean get away to the nearest tradelane and
lololol at him.

If they're on a tradelane, they're sailing on a rail. Just need to know where
the waypoints are. The majority of captains who are complaining are doing so
because bored players can camp on a lane and ambush them, rendering compasses
useless for virtually the opposite reason. So...you've got it so backwards
you're right. It's arguably easier to kill a random pirate than the one you've
got a compass for. If you've got time to idle in one spot and scan every so
often.