This looks worse than the Teaser trailer version..
I think it's a net gain, but still a mixed bag, because the delta design is just
not a great one to build off of. I think once we get a look at it from the front it will still have that weird look with the undersized (Enterprise-E-style dish). However, I think the body is a genuine improvement, especially how the nacelles are now RAISED rather than completely in-line horizontal. It gives it a more conventional Fed ship look where the nacelles need to either sit higher or lower than the mid-point. They aren't raised a
lot, more like Enterprise-D level. It's
enough.
The design no longer looks early-to-mid-70s. It looks more like early 80s (lots of angular folded-paper lines and not a lot of smoothed organic surfaces) with a dash of late Berman-era in the Nacelles. So it is ultimately still anachronistic in that it seems to leapfrog TOS,
but it brings it more in sync with the Shenzhou so they're establishing this as a consistent pocket-era.
The gap in the saucer is stupid and thrown in just to be different, but then you could say the same thing about weird things like the physical isolation of the hulls on the Oberth class or how the torpedo crew were somehow able to move back and forth through the rollbar on the Miranda class. So implausible ergonomics has a long tradition in Fed ships as sometimes things were done just for aesthetics and not plausibility.
So while at one time I though the Discovery design was a huge fail to the point of being a liability for the show's success, I'd say they managed to rescue themselves from the abyss. I don't think it's a great design but it's...good enough.
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