With the station partners agreeing to a six-person crew and no details
on how that will be atchieved may actually be good news. The good news
is that maybe the U.S. design will not be completed, but the
technology supporting it will (that's what the partners did agree to).
So if the U.S. design isn't completed, why is would that be good.
Because the U.S. design is based on ideas and designs developed in the
80's. Since the 80's, technology has really advanced to the point that
we may actually get a better product for a lower price, and a much
faster timeframe to develop it. It's like saying "Let's a build Viking
(to Mars)" for billions of dollars and at least a decade to develop,
while in 1997 we did something better with Pathfinder to Mars at a
mere fraction development time and money. The same could apply for
station stations. Look, just in recent years we had proposals for
Transhab and an Italian module that were already much cheaper and
faster to build. So imagine what NASA could do today with a
smallish-modest budget and a seperate program to build a Hab module
based on twenty-first century designs?

Then again, we did that with the CSV and lack of progress in that
program is making the House severely cut its budget. And we're still
the 70's space shuttle... But Russia is still flying the 60's Soyuz...