In an older game I like to play, Sims 2, someone made a water shader mod that added significantly improved water textures as a dynamic extra layer over an existing -- you guessed it -- static and simple 2d water plane. While the added layer was also technically 2d, it was dynamic in that it was animated, but it was also had a wavy structure to it, which was also animated, giving the impression of an active, dynamic sea, given the limitations of the old game. It was also depth sorted to always appear on top of the original flat 2d sea layer.
Here's what the change looked like in-game. You can see the reflectivity was increased in addition to being made wavy. It is also harder to see the subsea landscape as well. (Both images have been post processed.)
Before:
After:
Is it possible something similar can be made for SE, where a dynamic overlay to the existing flat 2d seas can be added?
Specs: STGAubron desktop PC; NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060/PCIe/SSE2 12 GB Vram, Intel Core i7-8700 3.2 GHz, 12 cpus; 32 GB RAM; Windows 11 x64