It's hard to offer much speculation without data. Personally, I'm not yet convinced that LA Creel will offer better data for stock assessments than fishery independent sampling (with nets). It is hard to implement a creel survey that is sufficiently randomized to provide an accurate assessment of biomass or population.
Inevitably, compromises are made by the need to survey when and where you can have employees, and from what we've seen, survey results are likely to depend both on the particular personnel and on the anglers whose catches are surveyed. It's hard to consider data reliable if the surveyors don't actually see the fish.
Most fisheries programs that employ both fishery dependent data (creel surveys) and fishery independent data (net sampling) use them in a complementary manner. A good creel survey can add confidence if findings agree with the net based sampling and decrease confidence if there is disagreement. There are also a number of trawl samplings that occur in LA waters both by LDWF and federal agencies. Systems where the estimates for spawning stock biomass correlate well with age zero population from nekton sampling give more confidence than those that do not. (Lots of spawners should produce lots of young and vice versa.)
Unlike many freshwater lakes where most of the area is actively fished, LA waters have lots of places for trout to be that are seldom fished. Fish move over large areas and poor angling success may be due to factors other than a statewide population dip. Erosion, weather, tidal patterns, and major shifts in available forage often the fish in different places than produced easy success in earlier years. When the forage base shifts from shrimp to menhaden, the trout may be chasing the menhaden and be harder to catch.
Certainly, we'll all be better informed with more data provided by LDWF. But we've seen nothing to cause us to doubt that the speckled trout population is in very good shape statewide. Shifts in forage base, habitat, and weather patterns have made them harder to catch this year, but that likely indicates that there will be more to catch next year for the anglers with the skill to find them and get them to bite.
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