The original FFE you couldn't change ship because the screen backdrop for any ship larger than your starting one was in the wrong format and caused the game to crash. Wasn't the only ambitious-but-clearly-unfinished game I played back in the 90s either - some of them weren't even written by Frontier!
I don't think this is a case of industry-wide standards having slipped. My particular sub-field of programming barely existed in 1995, but standards have very definitely improved since then. Code quality and skills which would have made someone a guaranteed hire when I started out wouldn't get an interview nowadays ... as I regularly discover when looking at the code from the early 2000s I still need to keep running.
(As for that specific bug in this release, I don't get why they didn't just delay the release a couple more days to fix it, since they knew it was there!)
The year between the FC release and the Odyssey release where Frontier were too busy to add new bugs was really popular, especially with hindsight.