I think the issue is less about coming up with shapes that fly well in the sim (or even in the wind tunnel), and more about turning those shapes into practical

I think the issue is less about coming up with shapes that fly well in the sim (or even in the wind tunnel), and more about turning those shapes into practical aircraft. Computers can’t really help us with that (yet) except at a really granular level, with human supervision. As an example, take the longitudinal fuel bladder in this design. I don’t know how you design a version of that that isn’t subject to very scary longitudinal sloshing and doesn’t have unprecedentedly complex plumbing that will be very, very, very expensive and risky to validate for normal flight operations, let alone emergencies. And that’s, like, the most obvious problem with it, and I’m not even counting all the normal, mundane airplane problems the incumbents have already spent millions of man-hours solving.