Soyuz Users Manual (2012) [pdf]

If you think about the airship, it's the ship mental model transferred into the air. It stays aloft with buoyancy and needs a vast hull. In airships they had signaling devices from the wheelhouse to the engineers working on the engines, to set the engine speed. Large crews, cabins, dining space, everything.

Then came the airplane and demolished all that. It was small and lean - and it was fast and required far less infrastructure or crew. Air was a different medium than water and it required a different paradigm. There was no space for dining and the flights didn't last for days anyway.

It can be argued that the Space Shuttle suffers from airship syndrome: it tries to be like an airplane with a cockpit, wings, landing gear, payload bay, carrying big engines in the back.

The Soyuz is just a capsule. Because weight goes above all else in space launch, when your payload is about 2% of total launch mass. And the simplicity is for safety. If all guidance fails, it can go to a spinning mode that still enables a safe re-entry.

In a sense, the earlier Vostok and Voskhod spacecraft are even more extreme embodiments of the lean capsule philosophy, as their re-entry vehicles are just balls with an offset center of gravity. AFAIK they could re-enter with any attitude and always turn up right. IIRC most other capsules have at least two stable modes, and there is some care needed that the wrong one is not used.

The same tight focus and lean principle can be seen in many other vehicles. Take a look at the A-4 Skyhawk or F-16.

The Space Shuttle had some extraordinary capabilities, but it was so large and complex that it took a large amount of the budget, just for launching humans to space. There couldn't be much human launcher development while the Space Shuttle was flying. Imagine you're renting a castle - hard to buy a house when all your money goes to rent...

You can consider ill-fated Komarov's flight as a part of early testing of Soyuz. Sort of like Apollo-1 crew forced making Apollo much more fire resistant.

Soyuz, as a non-reuseable technology (actually, some parts are reused) benefits from incremental improvements; Soyuz of today has quite different equipment than it had in late 60-s. Komarov, as well as Volkov, Dobrovolskii and Patsaev paid with their lives to make Soyuz safer... this is part of the reason this old design still carries two to four flight per year without casualties. Still way less safer than the aspired gold standard of commercial aviation :) - relatively recently Soyuz had some ballistic aerobraking scenarios, where safety margins are thin...