Seems more accurate to say that Jefferies was designing a future version of the Enterprise for Star Trek II/Phase II. He wasn't redesigning or changing the TOS Enterprise as to how she looked in "The Cage" through TOS.
Future versions of the ship are in-bounds, as per the OP, quoted below, in enumerating TMP as one example of what is covered by the topic.
The fact that there has been a perceived need to change the original Enterprise design - whether it be for Franz Joseph or TMP or DS9 or TOS-R or Disco or SNW - implies that if Matt Jefferies had designed it in 1974, 1979, 1996, 2019, or 2022, it would have been deemed somehow inadequate.
My point was that Jefferies did in fact execute such a redesign.
The fact that Jefferies incorporated improvements is enough to demonstrate that he accepted the need for improvements. The in-universe viewpoint is entirely subordinate to that point.
Make no mistake, it is absurd in-universe that there would be no secondary exit to the bridge. A real world design would have been the product of many more man-hours than could be devoted to any television show. Fans realized a need that an actual design team would have uncovered before the second starship left drydock, if not before the first had.
While I agree with you in theory, let's look at another fellow who felt that there was "room for improvement" with something he created: George Lucas. George was unhappy with his creation despite the fact that millions of people loved it. And his efforts to tweak his original work using state-of-the-art technology he didn't have back in the '70's and '80's is quite debatable as to whether any of it actually made a significant difference either to the story or to the audiences' enthusiasm for the material. Speaking for myself, there were a few additions that I felt were worthwhile, but on the whole, most of the changes he made were unnecessary.
My point: There's no reason to fix something that isn't broken. And more specifically, there's no reason to make changes to something iconic when nobody asked for or wanted any changes in the first place, despite what even the creator of that iconic thing wanted.
The comparison SW97:SW77 is way more like TOS-R:TOS than SNW:TOS. There's a fundamental difference in the latter comparison. Revising a preexisting film whose individual success had already peaked, by making some relatively minor visual changes and relatively minor subplot changes, is very different from adapting a preexisting property to make entirely new films/episodes for an audience decades removed from that of the original. It's really an entirely different problem altogether.
So in the case of the NCC-1701, I don't think anyone asked for that thing that John Eaves came up with. Heck, nobody asked for that thing that Ryan Church came up with in 2009. If someone had asked me what I wanted, I would have said to update everything to a more realistic-looking level of tech, but keep the iconic aspects of the show relatively the same. And since most of the viewing audience doesn't really care what the ship looks like, why not just keep it like how it originally was, only utilizing that new 21st century tech to make it a CGI model rather than something you have to move a camera around?
I'll start with, "I don't know," I'll reiterate that I'm not onboard many of the results, but I'll also add some personal speculation regarding what some of the motivations might have been behind the artistic choices that have been made. I suspect the problem is that what's on screen must pass for "the future." A widely appreciated vision of the future made 50+ years ago (I'm speaking of TOS) has by definition influenced the present, which in turn impacts our expectation of what the actual future will look like. This is reflected in the recognition that the term
retro would be appropriate when hewing closely to the TOS vision of the future. But if the artists don't want to go too retro, there is no alternative but redesign, re-imagine.
Passing for the future is not a problem that
Star Wars ever had. It was always heavily retro and fantastic, never needing to lean on realism for any length of time or to any great degree. This is another important difference between SW and ST.
I also think this isn't really a glass half-empty situation. There's much in SNW that hews remarkably closely to TOS. The flip side is, of course, glass half-full.
Finally, it's worth noting that on SNW they've already hinted that time travel mechanics may have affected the flow of events. To say more probably requires spoiler coding. Although they haven't said it in relation to how things look, time travel could be the basis for explaining visual differences also; for many years it's been a somewhat popular fan theory that the events of
First Contact altered the flow of time, affecting the events as portrayed in ENT, and even explaining the appearance of the Kelvinverse just prior to Nero's incursion.
).
