A little abstract, perhaps, but relevant to the question of why airplanes are the way they are. Then V-2s led naturally to satellite launchers and moon rockets. More recently, military aircraft shapes have been influenced by stealth considerations. Yet they flew well enough to be tolerable given their advantage of being difficult to see and shoot down. Only time will tell.
Every design involves compromise among myriad conflicting requirements.
Human ingenuity in the days long before computers achieved remarkable successes and rapid advances. Evidently it is the gifted engineer's capacity to balance these demands while pushing the boundaries based on solid theory and experiment that has made each advance possible. We can see, looking back, that the significant developments occurred for logical engineering reasons. Looking forward is not so easy. As Mr. Jaeger says, it will be interesting to see how wrong our best guesses at future developments will turn out to be.