Time is never on our side, and I do wanna say I feel like it's commendable that you've created all this within the timeframe of the jam. Looking forward to seeing the prettied up version!
In JAMS, which my friend/fellow Devil Whale Rik wrote, durign playtesting we came up with a similar idea to what you're describing (and apparently that Trash to Treasure does, though I haven't gotten around to reading that one yet). JAMS just has one static number that players have to whittle down during a round, as opposed to one shared "threat dice pool", but the concept is similar. During playtesting we found that it really amped up the teamwork and community aspects of the game, but further abstracted what exactly you were defending against. As JAMS has a lot of objectives/situations that aren't as hostile as in Eat the Reich or Shoulder Parrots and Hooks for Hands, that actually worked out really well for JAMS, but your mileage might vary. Interesting idea to play around with at the least, for sure!
I feel like either idea for a ship situation sounds fire! I think having it be a bit more "focused"/straightforward, with a smaller location and mostly a main objective to focus on, could work really well, yeah.
This does remind me that I really rather liked the way you handled locations and objectives, specifically for a heist-centered game!
Anyways, I look forward to seeing the next version, and good luck with your further yar-har-fiddle-dee-dee-ing.
- Jorrit