A key part of the new art is having clearly visible walls that separate the various rooms. There are no doors yet, but when crew walk from room to room they walk underneath the walls, which gives a much better sense that they're inside the ship.
The new art is not just aesthetic, though. It serves some practical purposes too. The lighting color lets you know at-a-glance what kinds of systems you're looking at, even when zoomed out (red for weapons, orange for thrusters, tan for hallways and crew). The presence or not of colored lighting also indicates whether that room is operational (a dark gray cannon tells you that it doesn't have any crew operating it). And the number of ammo bullets loaded into a cannon tells you how many bullets that cannon needs to fire.
