I couldn't agree more. Also, thanks for making Homeworld, it was great!
I was building a 3D space game engine myself as a kid around the time Homeworld came out and realized that rather than using a skybox with texture maps, you had it created out of a bunch of triangles with color interpolation.
IIRC, I had problems reverse engineering your data format in order to incorporate them in my engine. I emailed someone on your team and was very surprised to get a reply with an explanation, which helped me finish that feature.