The thing is they could quite easily have made some improvements at low cost and little effort with a bit of thought. The highly excessive first class capacity on the 7 coach meridians should have been reduced during the refurbs, negotiations with the DfT about reducing the service levels at East Midlands Parkway when it became apparent that an airport station with no link to the airport it serves was not very useful, rearranging the shift patterns of ticket office and gate line staff to better match demand, timely repairs of broken station infrastructure (lifts, toilets, benches etc), applying pressure on rail gourmet to be at least somewhat reliable, continuing promotions such as the red dot days and extenting them away from the aforementioned East Midlands parkway.
The 7 car Meridians I agree are a pain in the backside. They were OK on the fast Nottinghams but have insufficient capacity for the Sheffield services, being used primarily because they're faster than a 2+8 HST.
Killing off East Midlands Parkway is never going to be politically acceptable and the car park seems busier now than it was. It also serves as a useful if rather expensive staging point during engineering work.
Rearranging staff rosters is all well and good but funnily enough we don't like it very much so it has to be done sensitively. There is also a budget and you can rob Peter to pay Paul but only so far. Station staffing is one area I feel much more could be done but I can't really go too far into it. Sadly I don't feel your gripes regarding the likes of Hinckley and Narborough are likely to be resolved to your satisfaction, if I was a betting person I would say a closure attempt for the booking offices if not total destaffing is more likely within the next 10 years or so.
Rail Gourmet do have performance penalties, again, can't really go into that. I'd rather all catering was in house.
Promotions are designed to drum up demand or fill up gaps in demand - they're not provided out of the goodness of the promoter's heart. Now EMT are entirely on a service contract with the government holding the revenue risk I doubt there will be any more promotions.
I think the last Red Dot Day was in 2015 which was the year the original franchise ended. EMT don't use the red dot in marketing anymore either having changed their brand slightly.