ARK and its developers have many plans and ideas about improvements, and yes, some of them has been already implemented, but to be fair, ARK is more stable for the large reason of 51 delegates instead of 101, as the current codebase (lisk and ark) clearly has a problem keeping 101 nodes in sync.

When you have this kind of problems you either have to reduce the delegates, increase the blocktime or improve the codebase. For lisk reducing the delegates were never really an option, increasing blocktime were brought up, but Max felt it would be a step in the wrong direction. So they left with improving the code and that is the hardest.
ARK had the luxury to play around with every option before making a decision (there were several test before we picked direction) to reduce the delegate number, before future code improvements can be implemented, like forging uncles, that will hopefully allow even shorter block time without causing stability issues.