Is the Pirate genre overlooked in RPG's?

The main trouble with meshing pirates with DnD is that wooden ships can start to seem a bit fragile when the fireballs begin to fly (to say nothing of dragons).
The good thing is that medieval warships usually had smaller crews than the sailing ships of the Age of Sail, so it's actually easier to do
realistic boarding actions - a medieval cog might only have 10-40 guys aboard, not the 100 or more in a 17th Spanish Galleon or Man o' War.

The bane of running a pirate game is "okay, our horde of pirates attack your horde of guys" and then you have to get all abstract with the combat or spend
all day resolving it. But at least with OSR DnD rule sets it's possible to have about 30-40 guys on both sides and play it out in full detail if you
have to in an hour or so; with most folks at 3-5 hp each and so dropping dead after a single sword blow even 5th-7th level PCs can wade through the normal dudes like
Conan does in Queen of the Black Coast, which is kind of fun. You can just have the crew surrender after they lose half of them, so no need to fight to the end.

If I were doing a fantasy pirate game I'd go with a DnD world where big area-effect ship killing fireball type spells were rare, but there was no gunpowder
so ship crews don't need to be scores of guys to man the cannon, just close in boarding and a few siege weapons. (Maybe set up a region where a Spanish
Inquisition-type church had eliminated most of the mages... a few exist on the run, but most of the powerful spellbooks were burned so finding spells the DM doesn't want is tricky...)

Of course, Spelljammer had a lot of pirates, etc.