The thing I remember most about FJ's effort was his attempt to assign registry numbers for all the Constitution-class ships... and to suggest that all except the Constellation and Republic fell into line nicely with NCC-1701 just seemed ridiculous to me... What would be the odds that all the other starships were numbered sequentially when the two besides the Enterprise discussed or seen in TOS weren't? That in itself invalidated the whole concept of him as "authoritative" regarding Star Trek concepts... in my mind he was just an interloper.
You can get any hardcore Treknical guru to answer this one, but I'd might as well step in...
Real ships that float on oceans are produced this way with serial registry numbers and, yes, that includes our famous Space Shuttle which takes to space, or is that Took to space...
As for FJ being authoritative, Gene approved of his work and the amount of work FJ--an aerospace engineer/draftsman--put into it is absolutely astounding, especially by todays standards when any computer nerd with CAD software can churn out stuff... FJ was the first and the greatest... He Made Treknical Fandom! No other science fiction vehicle can make this claim! There are even some Tech fans who reportedly have built shrines to the memory of Franz Joseph... You don't get that kind of respect doing half-assed work and not knowing what you're doing...
But let me hit that on the head regarding Registry numbers and those oddball ships... According to Treknical Fandom manuals, the Constellation and Republic were originally older starships of the Horizon and Archon classes... They were upgraded and served as testbed vessels for the soon-to-be-produced Constitution class...
The USS Constitution was the lead ship, the first new-build starship, and thus carried the NCC-1700 number and nominal class name... The sister ships which followed were laid down, launched, and commissioned sequentially... I'd go into discussing the next generation of heavy cruiser classes--how they are interpreted in Tech Fandom--and how the Constitutions were refitted to incorporate the newer technologies (Bonhomme Richard and Achernar classes), but you've already made your mind up about this, uh, fan-drivel so it would be a waste of my typing skills...
What pisses us first-generation Treknical fans off most is the amount of respect given to that wall chart in "Court Martial" which consists of nothing more than random numbers of ships apparently being serviced at that moment at Starbase 11...
