It's just a preference; you like the literalism of alien writing, others may like the mundanity of being able to look at the inscriptions as standard military labels rather than cool exotic writing. Star Wars, I think personally, isn't the best example, because no matter how sweaty or beaten up they are, it's so cool you want to aspire to it. The exotic lends a chic to it. You're looking for literal realism, I'm talking about allegorical realism. That's just down to preference, I suppose.

I think they don't pass around numbers on bits of unseen paper because that's really stilted. In real life, people say their numbers to people or repeat them as they're writing, or ask the operator for information on the number and can't write it down. I suppose that's another literalism versus allegory thing; the convention is just that, a non-literal convention to enable more realism in character behavior, rather than allowing for strict, number-perfect detail accuracy.