Dutch merchant-warship design tradeoffs

What criteria shaped Dutch ship design beyond cargo capacity, low crew cost, shallow draft, and speed?

Dutch merchantmen were also designed with wartime conversion in mind, so stronger construction and merchant-warship interchangeability made them useful naval and pirate vessels.

The response adds a frequently overlooked requirement to the viewer's list of Dutch design priorities: for many years, Dutch merchant ships and warships were interchangeable. That expectation encouraged comparatively strong construction instead of optimizing the ships solely as lightly manned cargo carriers. The resulting vessels could shift into armed service and were especially useful to pirates. Their versatility may explain why Dutch-built ships appear disproportionately often in pirate service relative to the Netherlands' size.