They could have streamlined the race selection, just made a list of arenas and races. Instead you had to go from world to world and find the vs version of each event.
That's not entirely true. Sonic & All Stars Racing Transformed came out at roughly the same time and has a meta score a good 9 points higher. Having played both I'd say it's a fair assessment of their relative quality; LBP wasn't bad, it just wasn't particularly good.