At the time of the introduction, the battleship grey livery was considered “thinking outside of the box”, and received a lot of media attention and praises.

The problem with battleship grey is that it does not age well, and it does not hide dirt marks well (ironically white does better). Just look at your black and dark color cars vs white car.

When the plane came out with new battleship grey paints, it actually looked nice, but within a year, darker paints started to fade and the plane looked somber.

When UA took delivery of several 774s in the 1998/1999 period, those birds came out with fresh paint of battleship grey looked very nice and you could see they attract a lot of looks at NRT each afternoon when up to a dozen 774s were on the ground within a three-hour time period.

BTW, PMCO introduced the 𝙶𝐥𝐨𝚋𝚎 livery before PMUA introduced battleship grey!