My apologies for breaking this quote up, it's made it easier to respond to.
The difference being that there's no reason not to simply reverse a train at Eastbourne - there's nowhere else for the train to go beyond that. Whereas at Lewes, trains can continue to/from the east. At Eastbourne everyone either gets off or continues on an outbound train in the other direction, but at Lewes there are other directions you can head in. Eastbourne and Lewes are not really comparable. I see what you are getting at, however.
But that rather misses my point, which is that when a passenger catches a train at Bexhill for Brighton, it makes absolutely no difference whatsoever whether the train has the option of continuing somewhere else beyond Eastbourne or not. It is the "direct" (in terms of not changing) service to Brighton. Reversal or not is but a minimal time penalty of little importance (much less so with a shorter reversal at Lewes).
Hampden Park is much less important than Lewes. Granted, it is conceivable that you might change there to skip Eastbourne, but currently very few services are timed towards facilitating that kind of thing. Lewes is a far more important interchange. I have no idea whether you would actually want to stop twice at Lewes, but the point I was making was that the service from Lewes to Brighton is actually frequent enough that it is unlikely that, once you'd written the timetable to minimise conflicts, running direct with a reversal would actually be quicker. Thus I think the Hampden Park comparison is also weak.
Initially this sounds better, but examing it more closely you actually have 6tph eastbound using that line (I think) during the off peak. Blocking it while you reverse a train is asking for trouble, so I suspect you would be required to make this new platform a bay/loop separate from the current running lines, which is very expensive on the curvey alignment, and creates a very long platform/station. It's not inconceivable though, perhaps.
Once again, you miss my point. If a train is scheduled to stop at Lewes once, there is no conceivable reason why you would want to stop the train again five minutes later. Once again, as with Eastbourne, the passenger at Uckfield or Edenbridge or (dare we hope) Tunbridge Wells sees a direct train to Brighton. Five minutes extra reversal will be insignificant against this.
With regards to my various options at Lewes, none of them are perfect and without conflicts (and I defy you to find any flat junction that is), however, I don't believe that any have insurmountable obstacles.
Be careful, you're starting to sound paranoid; I don't think there is really a conspiracy. At least some of the parties involved in the last study appear to have been very focussed on seeing what could be done to make the figures look better - see Bald Rick on Norman Baker above, so it would be quite a tricky fix to pull off.
Well, I defy any railway enthusiast not to be paranoid in the light of the past sixty years of railway history. However, in terms of this case, until someone can explain from the report (which they may well do), where connectivity and wider economic benefits feed into the calculations that matter - i.e. those on which the business case was based, I'm not prepared to take it on face value that such considerations were included.