The whole point is that a lot of people are trying to force their own ideas.
With that I very much agree, with a caveat that "a lot of people" includes the modeler in this case.
The point of FSU is not to invent new designs. It is to upgrade old ones. Ideally, we'd have
feedback on what they originally intended the ship to be. Lacking that (concept art can help, but can sometimes be so different from the original that they're not much help), we have to guess off the original shape and textures. This requires a certain amount of creative work (and freedom that comes with it), but going overboard with it results in the model stopping being an upgrade and becoming a variant of the original at best. Figuring out which part of the design is not always easy, too. Ursa's guns could conceivably have been made triangular to save polies (small structures, large poly gain in comparison to round). Pods, on the other hand, almost certainly weren't (large structures, small poly gain compared to triangular).
Also, I wanted to say that artists are not gods, nor is "artistic vision" the greatest good for which one can abandon everything else. Just because something is pretty, hard to do or intricate doesn't mean it should not be criticized for flaws that it might have. That something took a lot of effort doesn't mean it's any good. It is particularly unpleasant to be told when that happens, but sometimes, even a lot of hard work might produce something that turns out not to be worth it. It happens and is a possibility every time one undertakes anything that requires hard work. Nobody is perfect, but with enough criticism, they can get pretty close.
IMO, the critic/editor/feedback giver is just as important as the artist when it comes to creating something truly great, and negative feedback is more helpful than positive (the former indicates area of possible improvement, the latter indicate lack of such areas, if anything). A lot of people (some artists, but their fans too, perhaps even more often) seem to be taking negative criticism as a personal insult of some sort, but it's actually more useful than praise.