Yes their practice elsewhere is better. Amtrak seems to think that lazzaiz-faire platform ingress/egress doesn't scale to NY Penn, but that's exactly backwards — it's not letting people circulate freely which doesn't scale.

Also, fun fact, if you don't go in the main hall Amtrak waiting area at NY Penn, you can board the platform whenever you want. But it's hard to figure out what platform/track to go to in advance — hiding that information is how they discourage this.