Dyret
Super Carrot!
my guess is that "better than necessary" was something of a standard for the art team.
That and if I recall correctly, many of the ships were used as background art at the varoius bases, so they probably wanted to set the bar high so they would look their best regardless of placement. Whatever the reason was, it paid off; When I fired up Privateer for the first time back in 04 or 05 after having played Prophecy and at least seen WC3/4 in action, I was amazed how much more 'real' Privateer with its relatively crappy old sprites looked and felt, disregarding FMV.
One of the coolest things about the models, though is the Gothri's gun placement, it's a shame it didn't make it into any fan project like Standoff or Saga.
Also, completely unrelated, what's the deal with its/it's in grammar. Word seems to correct me to "its" regardless of context.