There's been a lot of griping about sailor ability, but most particularly about gunners. The reload stat has long been thought to be completely non-functional, and the accuracy stat highly suspect. Fed up with the apparent lack of any hard numbers behind either (other than the brief rage of several tier 9 BB drivers), I decided to conduct a brief test of my own.

For reference, my gunners range from level 67 to level 73, and total roughly 150 accuracy and 90 reload. All testing was conducted at 120% morale.

Accuracy:

I hopped into my Mackensen, famous for its shitty spread, started a tutorial room and proceeded to fire twenty salvos. For the first ten, I had my gunners on board. For the second, I did not. I'm no photoshop whiz, so unfortunately all the screenshots are separate. If someone really passionate about this sort of thing felt the need to compile each group of ten into a single image for each test, they are more than welcome to do so. Here are the results, judge for yourself:

Test 1, gunners loaded, 150 accuracy:
http://imgur.com/a/BkUi8

Test 2, no gunners loaded, 0 accuracy:
http://imgur.com/a/wcUSr

Reload

For this test, all I needed was a stopwatch and the tiniest bit of coordination. This time, I only repeated the test five times each, but I feel the results were consistent enough. The outliers were due to factors like my reaction time and input lag. If you feel otherwise, feel free to conduct an identical test. Unlike the accuracy test, this one can be conducted in a live game with relative ease (though for consistency's sake, I chose to open another tutorial room in my case).

The default reloading time for the stock set of guns on the Mackensen is listed as 13.19 seconds.

Test 1, gunners loaded, 90 reload:
12.8 seconds
12.8 seconds
12.5 seconds
12.9 seconds
12.9 seconds
...for an average of 12.78 seconds, which is 0.41 seconds faster than the listed stock reload time.

Test 2, no gunners loaded, 0 reload:
13.7 seconds
13.4 seconds
13.4 seconds
13.4 seconds
13.3 seconds
...for an average of 13.44 seconds, which is 0.25 seconds slower than the listed stock reload time.

The difference between running all of my gunners and none of them, then, was a mere ~2/3 of a second

Conclusions:
So, contrary to popular belief, it would seem that the reload stat DOES actually do something.....barely. Strangely, though, the listed reload times for guns are not actually the slowest that those guns can reload. In other words, you have to have already spec'ed into the reload stat at least a little (or perhaps a lot, given how little a cumulative 90 reload seems to have accomplished) to even achieve what's listed as the base reload. This may explain why many thought the reload stat was non-functional. Previous informal tests had almost always yielded the exact reload time displayed on weapons' stats pages. Little did we know, this meant that our reload stats were actually working properly, reducing what apparently should have been an even longer reload to what was listed in those stats pages. Yet another baffling trait of NF2.

As for the accuracy tests, I leave it up to the community to decide. Personally, I see very little difference, and if any difference exists, it's more than likely just as slight as it was with the reload stat.

Yes, my crew is far from stellar and nowhere near maxed out, but I believe these numbers are pretty telling. Based off of this, the improvement in performance provided by even the most optimal gunnery crew would likely appear near-negligible.

Moreover, there will be and indeed already have been those who are willing to spend gobs of cash on items like training, patriotism, and triumph to attempt to boost their crews' morale. The futile nature of this effort has already been well demonstrated by complaints on the forum, but let's assume it was possible to achieve 170% morale on all crew with relative ease. How much do you think that would cost? How much of an improvement will that extra 50% morale give to your 0.41-second-faster reload? Will that improvement be worth the cost? And finally, would you be willing to eat that cost every week to maintain it, seeing as most of the morale items are on a 7 day timer?

...Welp, enjoy your grinds, all!