Ok, for a ship of that kind of scale, I honestly think it needs
far more in the way of geometric detail and less of a tiled texture appearance (which might even actually happen automatically as a result of more geometric detail).
You have multiple flat polygons the size of corvettes if not destroyers in there, and no matter what you want your design to be like in terms of philosophy, such huge flat and tiled areas look very fake and thus boring. The overall shape of this ship is quite simple - a good thing in this case; at that scale it makes it look impressive. It also means you can get away with spending a _lot_ of polygons on the hull itself to make it more interesting. Something that big is going to be a very complex machine right? Show some of that complexity off!
An example of what I mean would be a borg cube. Why is a borg cube more interesting than a flat faced cube covered in armour? Your eye can comprehend the full detail of a flat faced cube near instantly, and then gets bored and wants to move on. However, on the borg cube it can take in as much of the surface detail as it wants, which I reckon is what eye candy is all about.
In fact, I think I may know how to prove it to you:
Spent about half an hour smacking this together with no attention or thought paid towards overall design, individual greeble quality or anything remotely like it. It's based around the front of your design, and my aim is to show that just adding geometric complexity like this can straight away vastly increase the realism and eyecandy factors of most ship designs.
You also may notice that there are pretty much none of the recessed areas you said you dislike in the loki thread.
All the greebles are individually quite simple, but when used together it creates a visual complexity that is far more interesting than flat surfaces.
