Well, I've played discovery before so I'm not totally ignorant. But, personally, I was exceptionally hesitant to join Gallia simply because I think most of their ships are ugly. The Lynx looks like a stick with wings and the cougar is just a lynx with some bits attached. The Beam series of fighters/bombers are a bit better looking, but are ultimately just flat rectangular pancakes. Their gunboat also doesn't peak my interest. Only ships that look good for Gallia are the cruiser and the Valor. Finally I just decided to use the Raven's Talon since that actually looks nice, and is civi.
I'm sure I'm not alone in saying that when it comes to deciding what to be, what to fly, appearance matters a LOT. Sure there are people who'll fly anything if it's strong, but for me I'll only fly what I think looks cool, and so that narrows down my options a lot. Compared to a lot of fighter craft in the mod, the Gallic ones are really lacking, so I wouldn't fly them.
That's just my little input, doubt the faction would experience some magical revitalization just because you change the fighter models, but that was my personal reason for not wanting to join. If I didn't have a nice looking civi ship to use instead of the gallic ones, I would have joined something else like Zoners or the colonials.
