As it is right now, guild buffs are incredibly useful, but take a considerable amount of time and have a short duration. When visiting a high-level guild ship it can take three minutes or longer to gather every buff that is of some use to your character and this is even if you know an efficient route to gather the buffs. Not only that, but there is also travel time back to the quest entrance to consider. And by the time you start the quest your buffs might be down to 50 minutes. Then there is the examine button showing a character with a bajillion buffs and crowding out other useful information, even on high res settings! Finally, guild buffs take up way too much space on the effects panel along the top of the screen causing other effects to be crowded out. So I have a few ideas to improve ship buffing.

1) Put guild buffs on a limited-area timer. Much like hireling timers are not affected when in a public area, guild buffs should be not affected in a public area. (I could care less for people who complain that you can't use them for PVP. DDO is not about PVP.)

2) Increase the timer duration on guild buffs. I think a 3 to 6-hour timer would be reasonable without being excessive. For comparison guild augment crystals last six hours. For most players this would reduce their ship visit to once per session.

3) Make ship buffs a craftable item. This is the most detailed suggestion, but I know exactly how to make it work with existing game mechanisms without making things too inscrutable or not worth the effort. It will take some work on coding and I admit that, but since it uses existing mechanisms it shouldn't require too much effort. This suggestion would use0 a combination of mechanics from collectible crafting, guild augment crystal, and the Silver Flame/Emerald Claw trinket from Necropolis.
-Step 1: To begin, you visit up to five hardpoints within a guild ship and receive a single crafting ingredient from each hardpoint.
-Step 2: You place all five hardpoint ingredients within the stone of change and merge them into a completed "guild buff nugget," an exclusive item with five effects. You may only have one guild buff nugget at a time, much like the Silver Flame/Emerald Claw trinket. If the game detects the presence of an existing trinket, it is deleted from inventory.
-Step 3: I see three options here. The first is to make the guild buff nugget an equipable trinket. This would mean guild buffs might not be worthwhile for high-level players who probably have litany of the dead or a bloodstone; at worst it forces a choice. The second is to make the guild buff nugget itself a crafting ingredient which can be bound to an item in your inventory. This could be any item but I suggest only one type of item, such as armor, be allowed for this mechanism. Once the item is combined with the nugget, the item grants the benefit of your selected guild buffs for a limited duration, like items with guild augment crystals. Once the duration expires, the item can be bound again. Perhaps the best solution is to make it a consumable item, like a potion. Once consumed, it grants the various benefits until it expires. Consuming a second overrides the first, and since it is exclusive, you can't have more than one.

This may not be a perfect solution to the cumbersome nature of guild ship buffs, but maybe it will spur a discussion on the whole issue so that we can come up with something better.