Strangely enough, I was asking myself the same question one day or the other.
Actually the most realistic space opera CICs were those of the Earth Destroyers in Babylon 5, which were pretty much like a normal CIC on a warship.
Unfortunately they went back to the star treck kind of bridge for the white stars.
The Excalibur in Crusade had a mixture between the two, with a pretty circular bridge, but still with two dumb ahead looking pilots.
I suppose the Jeffries bridge design (a guy named Jeffries did the set for Star Trek, so they named the tubes after him) was more of a plot device.
It was build like a movie theater in order to have the whole command staff in one location and zoom in on everybody as needed. It saved set space and created a stage like athmosphere.
The whole "everybody staring ahead at the main screen" thing is idiotic as well, as there's mostly nothing to see except space.
I suppose the analogy Jeffries took was the quarterdeck of a sail warship "tack to starboard, Mr. Hornblower!" and so on.
Basically SciFi bridges oscillate between a plane cockpit and the Quarterdeck of HMS whatever.
Modern CICs are too unkown for the causal viewer.
Actually one of the most useful bridge designs was with the failed B5 pilot "Legends of the Rangers", where the ship had a circular CIC with a holographic display at the center and some kind of VR environment for the pilot and weapons officer.
The pilot sucked anyway....
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