It would be nice if CMP had brick or cobble stone paths rather than gravel, and Maybe a nice plaza area around the central fountains. I do like the splash park and the small cafes that are there though. They refresh looks good but there is indeed some areas for improvement.
For CMP I think they were hemmed in by heritage, in a sense they wanted to rejuvenate and bring forward the original Edwardian garden design. Not dissimilar to the Century Gardens and their quest to maintain elements of the brutalist original, incorporating heritage elements came at expense of functionality and current/future park context.
Both parks are now centre to a growing major city with huge immediately adjacent population density increases since they first were imagined - CMP in the early 1900s and Century Gardens in 1975. This corresponds to many multiple times the daily traffic as when they were first imagined (let alone cultural changes on how space is used). Adhering to heritage goals is often on the list but is ranked too highly IMO. In both cases, the narrow and constrained paths and the unusable grass spaces were a product of sticking to heritage elements too strictly as to limit the potential future use of the park. Ironically, I guarantee CMP's pathways would be 5x wider if we had the population density we have now nearby it back in the early 1900s when it's original designers were at work.
As for gravel v. concrete: many giant and 100,000x more popular European parks use gravel as their primary pathway system material. We don't seem to have the right texture, climate, maintenance or attention to detail to pull it off here as gravel appears cheaper, bumpy and trashy in many cases. It certainly doesn't have to and there are many, many examples of it working well (Berlin's Tiergarden, all of Paris' parks etc.)