The computer demo scene.

[publiusr]

Is it me--or does it seem like--the better the CGI gets, the less inspired spaceship design seems to be?

 

[Santaman]

I guess they had to be more creative in the past, some shapes just didn't work out or couldn't be rendered on the hardware of the time so they needed to fit the ship designs to what was possible back then.
And again, in the age of the 486 there was no dedicated 3D hardware like we know now and still they had 3D effects, the first card with some 3D enhancements was the S3 Virge IIRC and that was already in the Pentium/K5, K6/Cyrix era..

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

Is it me--or does it seem like--the better the CGI gets, the less inspired spaceship design seems to be?

The thing is it's space..... Ships do not need to be strealined in any way unless they have some flight capability in an atmosphere.