Currently most naval architechs use a 3rd party marine design package to design the hulls boats before handing over the imported surfaces for the rest of the boat to be designed around in SolidWorks.  It isn't that we don't have the surfacing tools to create the surfaces used in the hull that is why they don't use us, it comes down to some pretty simple buoyancy problems that these marine specific tools help them solve to make sure they have enough of the boat below the intended water line to support the projected weight of the boat.  Currently they start with a few simple surfaces that make up half of the boat and once they have the rough hull shape they "draw" where they want the waterline of the boat to be and then the software tells them how many lbs or tons of seawater that it is displacing and where the CG is of the water that is being displaced and then they can see if it lines up with what they think the center of mass of the final boat is and if it has enough displacement.  They just tweak the surfaces to provide more or less lift in the front or the back till the two CG's line up.

These marine specific packages also have some tools that help with fairing the hull (making sure it is nice and smooth from one end to the other).  I think our zebra stripes and curvature comb tools work well for smaller items but when you are trying to fair a hull over what might be 100+ ft, it is tough to see how smooth the transition really is.  The way the other tools solve this problem is that they compress the distances between cross sections along the length of the hull so that the boat is maybe 25% of it's original length and then they can tweak the splines by looking at the UV curves to make sure there are no sudden kinks along the way and then they turn off the compression.  It may even just be a graphical compression that they are doing.  They also only model half of the hull to start with and they have a trick that can graphically show them the other side while they are working if they want to see the full model.

As far as providing detailed analysis of the buoyancy of a boat you need to do it as an iterative process where you place a water line on the boat and look at the CG of the boat vs the CG of the waterline and this time instead of changing the shape of the hull to line up the CG's you change the position of the water line and recalculate to see if it is better or worse.  Of course this should be an automated process to arrive at the correct waterline.  They usually use a spreadsheet which has all the major components and systems on it along with their weight and moment arm as it relates to the CG and we could do the same thing with assigned mass properties for sub assemblies that don't have exact geometry to give accurate weight and balance.

I am happy to talk to whoever about this as I have spent a considerable amount of time talking with the marine guys and I think we could really enhance our abilities in the space with a few simple additions.