I believe from a dev stream last week the ship designer will be eventually. The race designer, sure that would be nice to have on the main menu to though it makes little difference as you can just go new game design the race then not start a new game.
True.
The custom race creator seems a little limited in choosing color combinations however. Each color scheme has a combination that it doesn't look like you can mix and match without editing the xml. Might be nice to break those down by clickable choices on that screen. Or possibly I'm missing something in the interface. I've only made one race so far. Haven't even put in any custom pictures yet.