In TNG "Cause and Effect", Geordi notes that the Soyuz-class (implicitly as a whole since they were looking at one close up) had not been in service for over eighty years. We don't have a specific reason why (age, design flaw, etc.), but it's pretty safe to say that this class of ship was no longer around to be randomly encountered.
What is significant here is that the
Soyuz is visually highly distinguishable from a stock
Miranda. So in-universe, the part that got outdated can rather naturally be assumed to be this distinguishable one...
We might learn more about the service lives of starship designs had there been funds and time for an actual all-new
Soyuz design. As matters stand, we basically learn that starship design as such is not a primary concern when retirement dates are being considered at the relevant tables.
I never thought they were ugly, just more steroid-infused than Constitution-class starships. They echo the Enterprise while taking the basic Matt Jefferies shape and lengthening or widening certain parts to create what amounts to a bodybuilder Enterprise that probably needs to lay off the Weight Gain 4000 but isn't "ugly," just the next step in the Starfleet evolutionary process.
It would appear that this was the very point here: to have a ship that is fit for bullying the poor
Enterprise.
Being appealing to the audience would not have been a prime concern. Quite to the contrary, ugly would be desirable: the
Excelsior is the big self-confident muscleman that the slim and fit hero character drops with her first punch, and the audience breaks in laughter.
Also, just as the Crossfield-class starships look awkward and inelegant thanks to being testbeds for the failed and classified spore hub drive technology the Excelsior-class probably look the way they do to accomodate the failed transwarp development project
...I doubt the looks had anything to do with that. Nobody in-universe finds the looks remarkable; the self-proclaimed experts that accompany Burnham to her kidnapping only comment on her interiors. For all we know, Starfleet took a couple of standard starships and then gutted the interiors for housing these esoteric experiments, while leaving the exterior unchanged.
Now, some of the other DSC starships Eaves did say he designed as "experimental", chiefly because he was told not to experiment much: his ships had to be flat and had to have square nacelles etc. So he took the one thing he did have the mandate to fiddle with, put the nacelles in weird places on weird pylons, and decided that these unusual ships (
Magee,
Engle, perhaps
Cardenas) were propulsive experiments all. Although they work fine as other sorts of "special" ship as well, as long as nothing is said about experiments on screen. We can always argue that a Starfleet mandate from on high to install new boxy nacelles on all ships (save the utterly outdated
Constitutions!) resulted in some rather makeshift pylon arrangements and layouts...
Timo Saloniemi
