I’ve never heard of the Sun Crusher and it isn’t in my personal Canon (I’ve never read the EU stuff) so I’m afraid I personally can’t accept that as an answer.
You might be right. Some of the EU stuff is fantastic (admittedly not the novel series that the Sun Crusher comes from). However, I will put the Darth Bane and Thrawn trilogy up against anything we have seen in movies or TV. The Sun Crusher is extremely overpowered. It's armour is virturaly invincible. Laser fire does absolutely nothing to it. It was once flown straight through a Star Destroyer's command tower and took no damage (the Star Destroyer did not fare so well). Offensively, it can destroy entire solar systems by making their sun go supernova. Makes the Death Star super laser seem pretty meek by comparison. So it pretty much sports the best defense and offense in the Star Wars universe, as far as I know.
I looked. 11 German aircraft downed for 2 losses early in the war. Later... the Swiss were compelled-convinced to stand down.
That's a thing I love about planes. In aerodynamics quite often something looking cool is also something working pretty well.
For a space ship, looking ugly and innocuous is actually an advantage... no one pays attention to you (until it is too late). It's better to be underestimated!
Certainly if you focus less on aesthetics you can spend more time on making it killy - that’s why I brought in the Eldar as an example. Their planes may look nice aesthetically but they suck against Tyranid Hive Crones (at least in 6th Edition they do). The Hive Crone at last gave Tyranids something with which they could really defeat Dark Eldar with, after the 5th Edition DE Codex made them ridiculous against Tyranids all because of having an unusually large number of poisoned weapons.
40k vehicles you say... accept no substitute... I haven't played 40k for over a decade, rules-wise it might be horrible... but still very cool.
I can only comment on the Monolith’s performance up to 6th Edition myself because 7th Edition was just essentially 6th with Lords of War, Tactical Objectives and other rubbish that I really don’t care about and 8th is just dreadful from beginning to end. The lore changes are abominable Imperium vs Chaos drudgery, I already told you about the laziness GW showed when making the 8th Edition codices and the new rules just don’t appeal to me. In any case, my experiences with my Monolith have been pretty good - it’s a pretty good Distraction Carnifex because it just looks so huge and imposing that it draws opponents towards shooting it just by the fact that it looks scary, and the fact that it can both teleport my units to get them out of worrying situations and can also suck in enemy models to their doom is great fun. In addition I’ve sometimes used the good old 3rd Edition tactic of using it to shield my units from incoming fire with its sheer size and Land Raider armour values and hull points. Also the Particle Whip - are there any Necron players out there that don’t love it? Unfortunately my Monolith has been destroyed most of the times I have used it, but mainly due to the sheer amount of fire used on it. However its sacrifice made sure that all that fire was diverted away from the rest of my army to target it, which means it has often indirectly helped me to secure wins. In any case, I nearly always take it in armies above 1000 points because it is just so fun to use.