Saga Star Wars vehicle "engineering": Will it be up to the task?

So, with TFA, we mainly got a rehash of older vehicles; nothing groundbreakingly new of real consequence, that I remember. All well and good, but it makes me wonder if we will get the awesome faux-tech in the new films that we got in the OT.

It's easy to take the elegant simplicity of the TIE Fighter or the lumbering awe of familiarity that the AT-AT represented for granted (just to name a couple of classics). I suppose the root of my question lies in whether in the age of CGI, if you can have the same sense of feel and respect for structure that you have when you go from hand sketch, to laying out the basic physical shape by hand, to kit-bashing all of the little componentry. It seems there's no substitute for holding a piece of something in your hand and pre-fitting it to see how it interacts with the other bits on a model, to give it "life"; and also to be able to say, "If I situate this here, this piece could provide dynamic energy transfer between the shields and cannons, and blah blah..."

I remember in one of the OT sketchbooks, it was noted that after building a prototype of one of the vehicles, they had Joe Johnston thicken the wings in the new drawings because of a vibration issue. Yes, it was a model and the vibration may or may not have reflected something in the "real-world" realm, but that still has to mean something in regards to a respect for structural integrity.

Joe Johnston and the model makers in the OT were masters at their craft. They owned their creations. Is that sort of thing possible sitting in front of a monitor, only able to "touch" your creation in an abstract sense? It seems we've seen a lot of styling exercises that were short on rational hardware packaging (for example, anything from Naboo), but very few things (in the CGI era) have screamed, "This is potentially plausible - in a faux-tech sense - and here are its practical limitations". That's another thing - CGI has no sense of scale or practical limitations; even when you're handling small-scale models, you're in touch, in some small fashion, with real-world physics; when you play with your Star Wars toys (I mean, as a kid, of course...), you probably had a scaled sense of speed and somewhat "realistic" turn radii with your vehicles. It's a sense that I suspect is hard to project when physically detached from your medium.

Anyhow, I hope we once again get some vehicle reveals that stretch our imagination and take our breath away.