Two or three months of extra work is not eternal WIP (especially since tilemapping makes half your detailing invisible). That's what I spent mapping and texturing the Erebus. The Dio was the first ship I ever uvmapped and textured and it took me two months from start of modeling to ingame.
UV mapping isn't that hard, and it isn't by resorting to tilemapping that you get better or faster at it. And even if your initial textures suck (like mine do), if the ship's already uvmapped, it's utterly trivial to replace them when you get better at texturing. Tilemap it, and you're not going to want to uvmap it later, because hey, it's "finished"! It may look bad, but it's finished. Truly worth the HTL, is it not?
No, **** it, I'm just going to say it: tilemapping is lazy. It might be excusable when you've got a few dozen new ships that may not get much screen time, but to do it on even your centerpieces is just lazy. That's three excellent models let down by terrible texturing. I don't care enough about Inferno to do it myself, but that's ok, because apparently the team doesn't either.