re: Ship of Fools
Lee's ship sounds like a very dull and grim place, everyone speaking the same language, with the same culture, same education (other than perhaps varying technical specialties), goals, desires, and maybe even similar personalities and psychologies.
That's called a society. People with a common history and culture. The whole point of starting over somewhere else is to try and get away from the problems facing this world. Your way leads to places like Bosnia, Palestine, the Caucuses, Tibet, Chechnya, the Paris ghettos, and every other conflict zone on the planet. Do you really want similar situations on a starship? "Multi-culturalism" is a complete failure here on Earth, it would be a total nightmare on an enclosed ship.
What I'm talking about would be no more different than transplanting a town from Sweden, Iceland, Japan, Korea, Ireland, Germany, Australia, rural Canada or the US to another planet. Except the town would consist entirely of well educated and highly trained people with a massive database of knowledge at their disposal. Improvisation and adapting to new situations wouldn't be a problem for them.
Dull and grim? Nothing could be further from the truth. People having been living with their own kind since the dawn of Man, and still do in most parts of the world.