Neither did the writer of TMP.
Debatable, considering how much of seasons 2 and 3 of Picard desperately needed a rewrite to make them somewhat coherent.
I think, in universe, it was largely just PR. A way to get resources to update the fleet.
In the context of the movies, ‘refit’ had several meanings. In TMP, it referred to rebuilding a starship inside and out to make it look completely different than how it looked before. In TSFS, Scotty’s line about waiting for the refit of Enterprise instead of taking the promotion of captain of engineering on the Excelsior presumably meant that it referred to just repairing the damaged 1701, but not changing it so it looks different.
However, in the context of PIC, neither example seems to be the case. Picard refers to the Stargazer as ‘these refits’ without any clear description of what he’s referring to. He might as well have said ‘these new ships’ instead of ‘these refits’ for all the sense it made.
It seems like the fleet just upgraded to some new systems, so maybe that was what Picard meant. We know the USS Titan-A is maybe five years old after integration of parts from Riker's USS Titan. It it unclear if there are other Constitution III-class starships around, or if they are built from salvaging damaged starships. Or if the USS Titan-A had already been an existing ships and the Federation Council decided to refit it with parts from the Luna-class Titan and rename and number it like they could have done a century ago with the USS Enterprise-A.
I think what we see is that 'refit' can refer to either a minor or major upgrading of a ship.
Though how Picard ended up handling ships was super dumb.
The original Topps trading cards released for TMP call the Refit a "Refurbishment." Which also works for me.
So ‘refit’ also means taking some components from an older ship, installing them in a new ship, and then everybody treats the new ship as if it were the old ship. Which is patently absurd, but Matalas wanted his Titan to be the same ship mentioned in Nemesis, and when he found out otherwise, he came up with some convoluted mess to justify it.
Matalas would've been better off by just saying the Titan-A was a different ship entirely that Riker only commanded for a short time before he and Troi retired. Such unnecessary fanwank.
Besides, there's no reason in-universe there should've been a Titan-A at all. Seems like it was just another vessel with average-joe missions that wasn't distinguishing itself like the various Enterprises.
It's even implied in the first season of PIC that Riker commanded several ships after the Titan, based on the line that his son was born on the original Titan and then 'raised on starships.' Because I'm not sure why Thad would be on any other ship that his father wasn't commanding.
But even so, I agree that the ship could have been any other vessel that happened to be Riker's last command. Matalas was just fixated on the Nemesis connection.
Which is one of the few times anyone has ever been fixated on anything about NEM other than the handful of Deleted Scenes or how bad the theatrical cut is.
Eh, TMP's idea of a refit was a lot closer than Matalas's, which is basically "it's a different ship with the same name."
Yes, that’s exactly right. But instead of just giving up on the Titan angle and just giving it a different name, he chose to make some convoluted nonsense. Which was PIC seasons 2 and 3 to a tee.
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