In the space of fifteen years we went from Battlestar Galactica, which used those same shots of Cylon ships swerving and getting blown up over and over and over; to Star Trek: The Next Generation, which used models for the ships and was therefore extremely limited in the scale and maneuvers they could portray; to Babylon V which used digital effects, allowing them a freedom of scale, angle, motion, and number of ships that nothing had managed before -- at the cost of being on the cutting edge of computer graphics, leading to a shininess, over-sharpness, and other telltale computer artifacts.

You can say they were too early, but not that they didn't lean in on technology and use it to their best advantage. It had weaknesses, but also strengths.