Health and safety gone mad! I'm sure we didnt have this, at least not so bad in the early 2000s!! Stations opened nearer to on time then and not months or even years late...
It's possible that the project management was better there, and the checks were done when they should have been rather than holding the whole thing up
Or maybe in the good old days, things were not half as good as some of you seem to imagine.
All the way back to the Victorian times, lines and stations opened later than planned/wanted by over-optimistic company directors, often because Board of Trade inspectors - usually former Royal Engineers officers who were not going to be fooled by assurances all was just fine - turned up and found all manner of corner-cutting going on, such as just a single track being complete on lines that were supposed to be double track, or level crossings being used to try to save a few quid where the plans for the railway included in the Acts of Parliament showed overbridges would be provided - net result was the lines were not allowed to open until these things were sorted out. Health and safety gone mad? Or just someone trying to ensure things were actually safe and built to the right standards?
In the case of this station, the construction took far longer than programmed, with precious little time then left to get the checks done before 'the end of the year' to quote the county council's line on opening in 2019 - and any faults discovered to be rectified, such as whatever the ORR's opaque wording means was wrong with the Cotswold Line platform.
I doubt we will ever get to the bottom of what went on, as the odds are the ruling Tory group on the council is not going to be in a hurry to investigate events on their watch. Though this time they cannot blame even worse ground contamination than expected and unmapped culverts, which caused much of the delay in opening the new Bromsgrove station, which was 14 months late.