Just playing the devil's advocate here, since I'm really excited about your work, Kobrar:
My understanding is that POM looks better/is more efficient when a surface has highly irregular bumpiness, such as rough bricks, stone walls, pebbled floors, where duplicating the contours would be a huge waste of tris. Its shortcoming lies in the inability to accurately reproduce a sillouette from the height map. (Unless you do wizardry like
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gcAsJdo7dME)
However, most of the surface details on FS models (but not all) are ship greebles and the lines between hull plates. Both of these feature highly regular details with lots of straight edges, flat surfaces, and perfect cylinders. Wouldn't it look better (and might perform better) if these details were modeled (as is the case with most new ships with greeble panels) or left to the normal map (plate gaps)?
I guess Vasudan ships kind of fall into the category of having highly irregular surface detail, so maybe that's where we'd see most of the benefits? (Also decals with POM are sexy, but that's decals)