Whether watching Kong: Skull Island’s airplane edit in a weird ratio bothers you is likely dependent on your own understanding and expectations about a film, and HBO may be banking on that.
In fact, if you want to catch the monster flick the way Jordan Vogt-Roberts intended it, definitely avoid the subscription cable channel.
Luckily, you can always catch the flick via a medium that is not HBO.
Directors are paid to make a thousand careful, often detail-oriented decisions every day, so I find it easy to see how many of them could go down a rabbit hole of annoyance regarding this particular issue.