Although it may be viewed as a pointless halfway stage, it must be remembered that much of the work on allowable buckling of stressed skin panels post-dated the design of aircraft such as the Wellington. Although initial research was done in the late 1920s, research by people such as Leggett (ARC report 2430, 1940) and Kuhn (NACA TN 2661 / 2662 1952) only appeared later. The choice of geodetics would also have been influenced by the background of the designers - Barnes Wallis was a former airship designer, and would have had extensive experience with the geodetics. As far as I know there was only one true stressed skin airship (the ZMC-2?), the rest were effectively geodetics.
In the early 1990s I did some minor work on the Super Airbus Transporter (Beluga) design, and had to dig back though the early research on large shell frames. I was suprised how much influence airship design had on aircraft fuselage design - in the proceedings of one post-WWII conference one of the comments (I think from prof Puglsey) on a paper even went so far as to suggest that a monococque fueslage was nothing more that a scaled down airship frame!