Have you looked at the recent shots with Vasari/Advent ships? TEC ships are blocky by design, but the other two races are much curvier and shinier. They seem pretty comparable to the image you posted aside from the [IMO excessive] bloom used there.
Well, Sins still loses to the beauty that is X³.
Sadly, over all the graphic improvement Egosoft made for X³ they absolutely and totally screwed the interface. The user interface in X³ is so cumbersomely it could be straight out from the DOS era.
And the graphics are also quite a resource hog and it never runs as smoothly as Sins does.
But one thing you could imho easily improve are the planetary textures. The current ones have just a too low resolution. Imho it should be easy for your graphic artists to improve on them. The current planet textures seen from near are just ugly.
And since planets are so large, you'll see them from near quite a lot, where as you don't see ships so near, so their textures are imho fine.
Oh, and the orange background still doesn't fit well where the edges of the texture touches each other.
Similarly for the north resp. south pole of the sun/planets. They need more work there to fit well.
