My wife got me an early Valentine's Day gift: the Starfield Visual Compendium. It is simply amazing. The concept art and seeing how things evolved over time is so great for any fan of the game.
One thing from it caught my eye in the intro to the Spaceships chapter:
We established visual rules and guidelines to avoid ship-design tropes common in science fiction, "no wings allowed" being the primary one.
It made me think about all the mods that have come out to add various wings - many based on the popular franchises that established those tropes. Even the better flips mod lets some of those Nova Galactic or Deimos wings flip into a more traditional airplane positions.
I totally get the design team's decision in the vanilla game, though. As they say:
Golden age space vehicle technology is inherently modular. Rockets are broken into stage, and the International Space Station is built from a series of segments bolted together. We decided to lean into this approach with a ship aesthetic that was purposely not sleek and streamlined but rather brutally functional; the modularity is front and center in the design.
The NASA-punk aesthetic. Since then, builders learned how to leverage a glitch in the ship builder to merge pieces together in new and amazing ways. That was until Bethesda fixed the "glitch" and then had to quickly course-correct on that (along with new mods that helped us configure the amount of merging allowed). You need only view some of the amazing ships on the r/StarfieldShips to see what that has allowed.
For myself, I loved the vanilla ship-building before mods were available. I envied those with the patience to use the merge glitch, but not enough to bother with it myself. When mods came out, I loved the added options for ship parts and building techniques, but I frequently dealt with stuttering in the ship landing/takeoff animations and even just moving around in the ship. Lately, I am playing with most of those mods disabled and test-driving many of the vanilla ships I had overlooked in past play-throughs.
As good as some glitch/merged/flipped ships can and do look...they're don't look Starfield to me.
The line you quoted sums it up perfectly:
Once you start smoothing and contouring and streamlining, the designs start moving further and further from the game's style.