The Witton Station plans are part of the extra funding announced by the government that the Blose thought was all earmarked for Knotweed Park. If Villa are contributing to improvements at Aston then that is fair enough, although much of the problem there comes from the attitude of the staff in control of the barriers as much as anything - they are still not letting enough people onto the platform, causing a bottleneck at the bottom of the stairs, a mad rush when a train arrives, and then trains leaving half-empty.
If they could just then sort getting trains back up to pre-pandemic frequency then it would make a massive difference. With the new trains you could move 15,000 people per hour on the cross-city line alone if there were 6 trains an hour instead of 4.