Me too, but turns out, there’s not really an abundance of people sharing this with us. That’s why my Tech Editor idea takes both kind of people into account. In the version of the Tech Editor (actually just more like tools editor, time-wise circa from tribal to medieval) I proposed a solution, that allows someone who purely wants something functional and does not care about the design to slap a thing onto another thing and within 10 seconds they are good to go, but someone like you and me can spend even 15 minutes just decorating every single inch. And I think that the approach we mentioned here would do the same for the spaceships.
Yes, basically just shapes that can be modified in proportions and do not have a function by default. This would be the torso of the ship, upon which the functional parts or other universal parts would be mounted. The shapes, however, would be simple geometrical stuff (e.g. a prism, a cube, a torus…), which could be easily modified into a desired shape using a grid that would be on them. Once you have the shape you want, you would select a part of the grid or the entire universal part and assign it a function, which I’ve mentioned somewhere above. Also, on this torso, you would slap the functional parts such as thrusters, guns et cetera.