Phileas, once someone comes up with a better idea, well it's hard to keep a secret when it's in plain view.
Boeing decided putting the engines on pods under the wing worked better back on the B-47. It's been a long time since anyone has designed a new subsonic airliner with the engines buried in the wing.
Similarly, putting engines in the tail works well so long as you precisely know the weight of the engine package. The problem is, engines have a bad habit of gaining weight - especially when the thrust ratings get bumped up. As a result, late production 727s carried several hundred pounds of ballast in the nose. The MD90 was much worse - fan blade out loads drove massive weight into the engines late in the program, and the required nose ballast was around a ton. That's a lot of lost payload/increased fuel burn and even ex McD engineers that worked on it admit the MD90 is not a very good airplane due to the extra weight. As a result, it's been decades since anyone designed an entirely new subsonic airline with engines in the tail (MD11, MD90, and MD95/717 all being derivative designs).
So, the A380 looks a lot like a 747 (but with an ugly fuselage), the A350 is hard to distinguish from a 787, and a 777 looks a lot like a 767 that got scaled up.
Until someone makes a new breakthrough that works - such as blending wing/body - it's going to be really hard to tell the difference between any new design twin engine aircraft from a distance, especially when there is nothing to gauge the size by...