It seemed like the project was started with unclear/unvetted requirements, led by bureaucracy and image instead of engineering. China tends to do things the other way around.

That smoke exhaust system seems absurd - I don't know how the architectural plans even left the design phase. It should have been isolated and designed such that it could be replaced with a conventional approach cheaply.

The rest of the project sounds like a deadline-driven fixed-resource software project with incompetent management - hacks and cut corners everywhere.

Unfortunately infrastructure bureaucrats aren't as forgiving as software customers...

Heh, funny but not that long time (started in 2006, planned to be finished by 2020), while Sagrada Familia (here in Barcelona) started at 1882 and after stopping/starting/stopping forever, it's not estimated to be finished by 2026–2028 (so about 140 years, if accurate).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagrada_Fam%C3%ADlia

That's not too bad. A lot of old cathedrals would take multiple generations to build...Notre Dame for example took over 200 years to build.