Wow. Things seemed relatively on track and then just fell off the rails quickly. Is this still largely Metro's fault?

I have no insight into their project schedule but in looking at the station renderings it looks like Metro overloaded the station plan, took on more than they could chew, and planned poorly.
It has a huge maintenance yard, C/K line switches, bus plaza, passenger dropoff point, etc. I can't help but think this could've been planned better in phases with the objective to safely open a bare-bones station first then expand from there.

The mezzanine also looks excessively large, similar to the new stations built for the downtown connector. The basic LA Metro platform stations of yesterday are perfectly serviceable (downtown underground stations of course are more complex, but the new ones still look overbuilt.) There are so many other priorities Metro can spend money on that will get more people in the system than overbuilt stations. It's like Metro is now sharing the same station designer as NYCT's new Second Avenue Subway stations. I suppose their new pot of gold from Measures R/M encourage this excessive capital spending.