the design is a matter of tastes, so it's completely up to you and your imagination, regardless what the others think. Critics are always helpful, but you have to make things in the way you want to make them; so, if you believe it is this the way it should look, then definitively you should go this way.
More important are instead the tech critics, if you want to put this fighter in game: your mesh in the older shots looks like having a nice collection of errors, wich will cause in the best situation an incredible waste of polys (a non efficent model, with a pcount higher than what the ship looks like, and a model that could be much much more detailed with a more wise use of the polys); in the worse situation it simply will not work correctly in game.
I'm not going to tell you all the modelling "rules", for two reasons:
-1 it's full of tutorials made by the community about how to make ships for the game, check this:
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/karajorma/freespace/intro.html it is a tutorial itself and it has links to all the other tutorials, and check also this, where a guy was having some of your same problems:
http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php/topic,18200.0.html-2 you have to learn with the experience how to avoid polywasting and some errors, nobody can really teach you that..as you know there are different strategies to make almost the same things, you just have to find the best ones. Example: the wings in the second screenshot. I think you deformed a solid like a rounded cylinder or something like that, making it almost flat.
It could be ok, but in this way the final edge of the wings could turn into a "double edge" (it looks like a line but instead there are many edges sharing the same position). If this is the case, it may cause problems and you will have to fix it. And secondary, the two verts, that subdivide in the middle this final edge, are useless, and increase the pcount.
My suggestion is: learn how to convert model and put them in game, make a lot of tests, learn what will work and what will not work, avoid useless vertices (vertices that don't have any role in defining the shape).
About texturing: I wish you best luck in finding someone to map your model.
There are very few texturers, and they all are overbusy; a lot of people always ask for someone to texture their models, but usually they find nobody. My suggestion is to test first it in game in order to provide to the artits a perfectly working model, and second unwrap your model before asking for a texturer.. it will be easyer (but still very hard) to find someone
