Goodness, Ken, you're sounding like a professor of modern art. Next, you'll be telling us that beauty is a social construct emerging from discourses of relative power and violence.
I was at an air museum yesterday with a female colleague. In between telling one another how we won the Cold War, we were talking about the relative aesthetics of the F-16 and F-4, among other things. The F-4 is malevolent but not without character, She is a big F-16 fan. We both find the F-35 lumpish and uninteresting, rather than actually ugly. But I have the same aesthetic reaction to the F6F Hellcat and it got the job done.