I don’t really know how to structure this question, but yeah, why is always Naval and never Aviation?
That might not even happen, though. Space isn’t like an ocean where you can move around arbitrarily; craft mostly follow ballistic trajectories. As it is, it’s actually more like artillery with human cargo than like aviation, let alone a boat that can go anywhere anytime.
The exceptions are craft with slow-burn engines like ion drives, which allow enough delta-V for a craft to hit more than one destination. Those still need energy, though, so they need to be near something like the sun to operate indefinitely. Over interstellar distances, a 20-year boost at millinewtons is still relatively short, and we’re back to ballistic trajectories. On such a mission, if the crew is human and awake it would be more a matter of keeping everything operating as intended than deciding anything. I expect any culture that develops would be more about the off-time.
Speaking of boosts, burns and delta-V, you can see a bit of space’s own culture growing already. My best guess is that the structure of a future interstellar mission would be a bit familiar to today’s ISS astronauts.
Sci-fi spaceships often have the ability to dump solar-system levels of energy into propulsion, so they really only follow orbital mechanics when they’re parked at a planet. Consider if you could get from Earth to Mars in a few seconds, you’d pretty much just point yourself at it and go.
Yeah, we were segueing into hard sci-fi and the real future here, so I’d thought I’d bring that up. OP was about this tendency in general.
In soft sci-fi you can just handwave stuff, with the basic way frames of reference work being a frequent casualty (via FTL travel). If traveling by starship is like traveling by boat, it makes sense day-to-day life would be a bit boat-like, and so that’s where many writers have gone.
