Well in regards to the Icaran Empire and AI to put it frankly they don't trust AIs and they believe in the "Supreme Dominance of Man" so basically trusting a machine over man is considered utter foolishness.
BTW they are more like 32nd century tech as they never had the dark ages in their history
But again basically for them it's a matter of "God made man supreme among creation so we should not trust a computer to perform those jobs man should do himself." By our standards Icaran factories are also remarkably unautomated except where necessary, this serves the double purpose of making sure very few Icaran citizens ever have to fear homlesness as there is literally a job for almost everyone in their society.
Being that a SD is just over 2km long and has actual gunnery crews among other things I decided a crew of 6,000 is pretty reasonable.....especially when compared to how cramped I thought an ST star destroyer must be what with it's crew of 40,000 odd people crammed into 1km.