Rogue waves pose a significant threat to marine vessels and offshore infrastructure, making a clear understanding of their dynamics and kinematics essential. While numerical and experimental modeling plays a crucial role in this effort, an ongoing debate within the research community concerns the relative importance of nonlinearity and unstable wave groups in the formation of realistic, directional rogue waves. This talk addresses this issue by highlighting the pivotal role of weakly nonlinear wave theory in the generation and control of deterministic and directional rogue waves, both in the open ocean and in controlled water-wave basin experiments.