Yes, I will agree that Nelson had a greater overall influence on future naval leaders and their tactics, but the reason I would rate Yi higher is because, the way I see it, he faced greater odds, yet achieved victories which were just as astounding (if not more so). I mean, with or without Nelson, the Royal Navy still dominated, which, as you yourself mentioned, was not the case with the Korean fleet. The reason that Yi wasn't as influential or as well-known as Nelson is most likely due to the former existing in almost kind of a historical vacuum (in addition to being non-western), in that Korean history, far more so than probably most periods in British history, has been very cloudy and unknown. Before and after Yi and the Hideyoshi period, not a whole lot is known about Korea, with the exceptions being some isolated instances of wars involving China and maybe others with Japan. The fact that Korea had almost always been divided into several different dynasties/kingdoms certainly helps not one bit. Not until the turn of the 20th century, with it becoming a Japanese colony, did this really change, and it wasn't until the aftermath of WWII that the Korean peninsula entered any kind of genuine importance on the world stage.
