Design is different than beauty, although it may incorporate elements of beauty.
Great design is "fit for purpose". It does everything well that you intend it to do.
It is unlikely that a group of individuals would agree on a single great design as they would undoubtedly have different intentions for its purpose. Otherwise we would all buy the same cars, same houses, and same boats etc.
GL how true that is and basically design is art and engineering. If we know all the specs and all about boats we could speculate on the design as a whole. But the OP wondering about why he liked the Huckins so well was I'm sure talking about the artistic or aesthetics part of design. That's also the side everyone thinks they know something about or more.
Walt says it was a good post and that it was contentious. As soon as we have two sides that are contentious we'll have that contentious thread or discussion.
Don says beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I take that to mean that beauty is only an opinion. I LIKE that and therfore it is beautiful. But we like things visually because something or some things respond to our sense of what beauty is.
I knew a girl (then girl) that thought the 59 Ford was the most beautiful car ever. I couldn't get my head around that as I thought it was the uglyest car. After much conversation it came out that she had really great times in a 59 Ford so her perception of beauty was entirely a product of her association w good times. Had nothing at all to do w the car's appearance.
If beauty was in the eye of the beholder beauty would not exist outside the eyes of the beholder. But it does. It does because there are elements of beauty that are part of the object looked at. They have nothing to do w social associations or whims of the observer.
If you consider the shape of an aircraft tail (vertical stabilizer) and look at the shape the outline provides you will find a lot of variation in the degree of beauty the image provides. Some shapes are ugly and some beautiful w much in between. I think the average person can tell the difference. I think an artist can tell the difference much more often and perhaps nearly all the time. I think even the worst guessers could tell the difference some of the time.
If you couldn't tell anything about the beauty in front of you a large group of such people would be able to tell if something was beautiful exactly 50% of the time. In other words ... not at all. 50-50. One could do that w/o a brain.
But I'm sure we all know something about beauty even though there are great differences in peoples ability to identify beauty when we see it.
To me all this means beauty is NOT in the eye of the beholder. It is in (or part of) the object viewed. And there are many elements of beauty. And the way they interact or fit together is a very big part of beauty. Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder but the beholder may not know what he's looking at .. beauty or otherwise. Unless he is trained and thus knowledgeable or knows through DNA or some other non-traditional learning means.
I don't think beauty is just an opinion of anyone passing by but a very complicated array of elements. Elements that can be learned (for the most part) or inherited in other ways.
So my opinion on beauty is that w much study and association w others that know a great deal about beauty and some help from nature one can recognize beauty where it is .... most of the time. And if we understand nothing at all about beauty we could identify it to some degree. Also if we were to have many people considered experts on beauty presented to several objects they wouldn't all agree as to which one was the most beautiful. But they almost certainly would come close.
And I didn't mean to imply that Great Laker said anything untrue. I took a course on design in college and we concluded (after a weeks debate) that design was "an organized solution to a problem".
You knew that was loaded question. 
