or "Aargh, me likes the turn o' her bilge, matey!"

Sea-going hulls are designed with a weight distribution and a buoyancy profile designed to provide gravitational and flotational forces which counteract the effects of rolling and pitching and tend to return the vessel to a stable, upright position when stressed by extreme marine forces. These must also be balanced against shapes which move through the water efficiently, are inherently strong, and are easy to build and maintain. Also considered is the ship's mission and expected operational environment. For example, sailboats are usually designed with a low initial stability (they tip over easily...) and a high final stability (...but only up to a certain point). They rock back and forth enough to terrify landsmen, but past a certain point they become stiff and unyielding, the point, incidentally, where they sail most efficiently.

Every ship is a compromise of these factors: one would not expect a coastal trader, such as a banana boat, be built to the same specs as an icebreaker. My Navy ship, a guided missile frigate, was designed for specific purposes, and many of its characteristics involved compromises to allow it to meet the requirements set for it. It was top-heavy, deep-drafted, very narrow for it's length, and contained many features specifically related to its mission of inflicting and absorbing extreme battle damage. These compromises were partly mitigated by it's having a very large crew (for it's size) of highly trained and constantly drilled professionals, and by specific maneuvers and strategies when dealing with foul weather which minimized it's shortcomings and exploited it's virtues.

But moving maritime cargo and passengers is an expensive enterprise, and the engineering decisions made for this purpose often run afoul of pure safety considerations, just like they do on a warship. This puts economic pressures on the designers that compete with the purely engineering decisions involved. It has always been thus, even the ancient Greeks had ships specialized for different tasks. One rule of thumb, the longer you go without a serious loss, the more chances the designers are tempted to take.

Just one example, it is often said the Titanic carried insufficient lifeboats for all her passengers because she was considered unsinkable. But even unsinkable ships could catch fire, or get torpedoed, or have devastating collisions, or suffer boiler explosions, or find themselves heeling so much half the lifeboats were under water and the other half unlowerable. Unsinkable was not an excuse, even if it had been true.