Vaalingrade
Legend
I am a fan of all kinds of wings and I'd rather have emerging/growing/unfolding wings that fake wings.Well, lack of tail I agree looks silly, and apparently so do the artists, since they do have tails in the art now. I don’t have the book yet, so I don’t know if the description talks about tails or not.
Ad for wings, personally I always think wings look silly on humanoid body plans. With stuff like angelic or demonic wings the silliness is kind of an expected part of the package, but with dragon people I prefer they just not have them. The spectral wings are also silly, but at least they’re temporary. And temporary physical wings would be even sillier.
I feel like the spectral wings are a 'now shut up' feature; something the designers do when they know the fanbase wants something, but doesn't want to give it to them. Happens a lot with flight. Back in 3.5, they knew people wanted a winged race and gave us a hideous wing-armed species that shot bows with their feet and had a terrible glide mechanic called Raptorans.
And to punish people who wanted half dragons, we had unnecessarily high LA or unbirthing. That was the first dragonborn, btw. We haven't gone all that far from 'we have what the fans are asking for at home'.