I use the core section 3 days a week for work. It’s brilliant, quite the feat of engineering. The scale of the stations is like nothing else on the TFL network.
I feel that somehow we hark back to the Victorian days where everything had to be epic but unlike the Victorian days, we are not making enormous profits by stealing resources from the empire that pay for the epic buildings.
In Japan, I think they have it right, basic concrete buildings designed for efficient boarding.