While it's understandable everything is random and should be the same odds, the prep phase takes too much time to put together and when the die misses, it feels like a turn wasted. Player 2 got a massive buff when the ship was built because then every dice roll mattered there, but player 1 couldn't even recruit a crew yet.
However, in the end it balanced out because of a bug that caused the player 1 to have 2 turns lol.