Flying Lab Software has posted a preview of upcoming career skill changes in Pirates of the Burning Sea.

1.12 contains a variety of changes to career skills. These changes are based on a combination of your feedback about the careers and data about how the skills and careers are getting used. There’s a theme to the changes for each career:

• Buccaneers: We want to make their group skills more worthwhile and give them more active time in combat with less cooldown cycling. This means they gained some reload rate, improved Command skills, lower reset timers and loosened skill use requirements.
• Cutthroats: They’re close to where we want them, but there are a few areas where they can use some improvement. One of those is the general lack of damage resistance, and another is a couple skills that aren’t very useful.
• Freetraders: This milestone doesn’t have many changes for Freetraders, as most of our plans for them are longer term.
• Naval Officers: We’re making a set of changes to help Navy with their speed and morale issues.
• Privateers: This class is seeing the most varied set of changes. They’re gaining better spike defense and improvements to a variety of skills. We’re also planning some chain restructuring down the road.

Read more here.

Everyone will agree that pirates reinventing itself constantly isn't a good thing. I'm not saying that's what these changes are but I would also like to a little more information about the 'theme' remark.

Are this changes being made because the classes were not well balanced yet or is the intention to give each class a more specific direction? The theme seems to suggest that but they don't elaborate much.

I don't know about balance but I do know that there's a lot of overlap, everyone gets speed, def, this and that, they end up looking a lot like the same class.