I agree also. But I am just following the reference pics as a guide. What I can't see, I take a good guess and make up something. In this area, I finally found a pic of the engine area with the pipe support hole cover on, so I used it as a guide
This pic was posted by Demoriel of his incredible professional work on two battlestars.
I use a few rules when deciding on what to model and what is rubbish.
1. I don't do rivets! Ugh. Victorian era technology!
2. I don't do exposed girders. More Victorian think.
3. It's much easier for a CGI artist to create something De novo than a physical modeler. They are limited by the kit parts they can bash together. In the case of the last pic, I used the train wheels as a start, and made something circular and round in shape, changed the details to an exhaust vent and added more detail. I recycled 2 greebles already made just like the physical modelers do, recombined them into a new configuration and saved many hours of work. Since this is the exhaust section, more vents look logical.
4. Keep the large greebles fairly faithful to the original, but ignore or modify the tiny gibberish since I have the design ability on a computer that physical modelers do not have.
5. Trade off surface detail for poly reduction. My target limit for this giant mesh is 20 million polys, so I have more room to play with than lower poly design and put more detail into exposed areas. In this area, I have chosen to put in the honeycomb grid in the exhaust. Since no one will care about looking for an authentic honeycomb grid, I did not round it excessively and saved hundreds of thousands of polys. For rendering, I will remove it and put a flat plate (2 polys) and set it to 100% luminosity as a glowing exhaust, like in the picture. In fact, I would remove just about all the greebles as well since the glare from the exhaust gas would obscure everything anyway. That would save about 2 millions polys in the renders.
6. Throw in minute detail in key visible areas to give a sense of the large scale of the design. This is why the physical modelers paste on all the plastic squares on the G's hulls. It gives your eyes something tiny to scale and focus on while you look at the overall design. It makes you think the ship is huge. You don't need to saturate every square millimeter with tiny greebles ( looks like surface dermatitis to me) to achieve the effect, just enough to do the job at eye trickery.
The end result is that if you look at my version, it appears at a distance to be a detailed, accurate TOS battlestar, but if you scrutinize it closely, the small parts vary from the original, or are absent. To faithfully recreate the G part for part would take 100 million polys by my guess.
I always keep these things in mind while working away on the big G. Just my two cents
