If the passenger quest is missing from the quest log, I will look into adding it. There have been several cases where a quest log was not added in COAS, but it would clearly make things better for the player to know some details, in case they forget, so we have had to add them. This might be another case we need to add.
I personally don't think it is worth my effort to add them in the hold or ward room for conversation. I would have to create dialog files, make them present in a "location" and even if I did all that, it would be relatively pointless, because what would you talk about? The weather? And to what purpose? I don't really see enough compelling reason to do the work.
For small ships lacking a ward room, where would I put the officers? New Horizons added another location, between 1st person on-deck battle at sea, but again, I don't see much gain for the effort involved (adding a new location, adding characters to it, etc.) The only reason it might be helpful, is to exchange item/gear, but that we already added a way to exchange gear with companions and officers via the Item screen. Since we can already exchange gear, and can already exchange positions in the character interfaces, I don't want to spend the extra time and effort for a feature that just enables you to see a bunch of useless dialog among your officers, because that existing dialog is not very useful anyway.