I don't have much personal exposure to "Common Core", but I've found when all the implementations turn out as shit, the blame usually lies with the specification.
My personal opinion is that a lot of this overloading on processes and bizarre approaches to presenting problems (and don't get me started on the form of homework assignments and tests) is because we're out-pacing the natural cognitive developmental process. For example, take the sample chapters that were on the front page a couple days ago from "Math from [Age] 3 to 7" [1] you can see a very interesting approach to building math skills. But even in that case, the author is rushing developmentally advanced tasks which are more likely to result in frustration and giving-up than engagement and learning.
Fundamentally, most learning does not occur while a teacher is speaking. The more absurd lengths the teacher goes to "explain" some concept, the less likely any child is to actually learn it. The more foreign the concept is by the time the kids get home, the less likely it is to be mastered.
I have a daughter in Kindergarten, but fortunately not one that follows CC. I just spent some time reading through /Math/Content/K/ on corestandards.org. Most of it is, IMO, complete trash and not at all aligned with how kids in kindergarten actually learn this shit. As a "spec" it's writing is sloppy, poorly defined, and highly ambiguous. If this is the starting point, I'm not at all surprised the resulting lesson plans are worse than nothing.
I also spent some time reading /Math/Practice and it struck me how all these things that CC is presenting as "Standards for Mathematical Practice" are not at all how children conceptualize mathematics, or cognitively approach the task of solving a math problem. Many of the stated practices are directly contrary to how children will naturally want to approach and solve a given problem, and I can imagine exactly how teachers faced with "instilling" these practices would get to exactly where we find ourselves.