To be fair, “Fox Sr” is probably the dumbest, laziest thing that they could have called him. Good riddance to that.
The rest, I mostly can't speak for, Having very little recollection of the SNES.
I actually preferred it, because it fits better with the fact that Fox and his father were clearly from a "traditonal" military family, where names seem to get passed down like that more often. That notion also fits in with how Fox handled the loss of his father in the SNES continuity (he accepted it and continued living), as compared to the N64 one (he didn't).
Creating James McCloud, who seems to be named after Captain Kirk, was seemingly the start of creating a pile of verbatim (and, to me, shallow) pastiches of scenes from other sci-fi productions, which was something that the original SNES games didn't do - those used some scenes-a-faire, but that's down to genre trappings, and they didn't outright ape entire scenes like Star Fox 64's story-scenes were often composed of. It always felt like Star Fox 64 couldn't be its own thing, because it was constantly remaking scenes from Gundam, Independence Day, and so on, and making unsubtle references to them (James and Bill spring immediately to mind, here) in a similar fashion.
I will say, though, that I like the idea of justifying team Star Fox's inclusion in such a way. It wasn't really explained in 64 and, while it didn't need to be to enjoy the game, actually maintaining a consistent, fleshed out and believable lore would definitely help push the exploration of different routes and even games within the series.
They tried to explain it in Star Fox 64's intro, but the problem is, it just doesn't mesh with what the reboot changed Corneria into, and it comes off a bit dissonant.
Where Corneria was a farming-driven planet with a small defense-force in the original continuity*, it was turned into a highly-militarised one in the Star Fox 64 continuity. Thus, calling in a team of four specialised outside mercenaries and saying that it's because their army alone can't do the job makes no sense there.
*Back in the day, when I was a kid, this caused people to easily draw comparisons to British pilots and "Dad's Army" defending a small island nation in World War II, because it was a direct parallel to the events in the SNES game. This was helped along by the fact that it was common knowledge, even back then, that Andross is called Andolf in Japan. (I personally found this to be an interesting motivation to learn more about the topic.)
Of course, while I'm all for adding extra little details that help tidy things up like this, it does seem a little odd to me that they would have all these high tech spacecraft in production with no hope of using or even properly them.
This made sense, too - you could easily infer from the information that was given that the intent was for the development of this technology to improve the reach of Corneria's tiny defense-force (since the Arwings are nimble and are capable of interplanetary travel), but that they intended to train the planet's own pilots for it once the new ships were completed. Andross taking over and enslaving the people of the not-barren (though polluted-by-Andross) SNES version of the planet Venom, and forcing them to serve in the army that he'd amassed, was obviously something that occurred before the ships and the training could be finalised. And it made sense to call in a group of specialists (billed as space adventurers in the original series, rather than the 64-lineage's mercenaries) for this.
It's worth pointing out that SNES General Pepper, unlike his N64-lineage equivalent, also wasn't the ineffectual fuddy-duddy who more-or-less goes to the Star Fox Team for everything even though he appears to be part of the authorities on a
very militarised planet - which is so militarised to the point of seemingly having enormous cities that plaster his face everywhere. The original Corneria only really had one major city, and that was the one where Andross' experiments caused disasters that killed inhabitants there, resulting in his banishment. Meanwhile, SNES General Pepper was a typical military man who was often more focussed on making sure that the team he'd hired brought back his precious prototypes safely, than he was on their safety. He was a bit meaner, and he seemed much more like the sort of person who would be tasked with running the planet's defense-force - he was more believable by far, I always felt.
(This also very much stuck out in people's minds, back in the day, in conjunction with the World War II parallels noted above.)
