Crown Colony cruisers were stripped-down Town derivatives

Could the Royal Navy simply have built more Town-class cruisers instead of Crown Colony-class ships?

The Crown Colonies already represented that approach: simplified Town-class derivatives intended for faster wartime construction.

The Crown Colony class was a direct development of the Town-class light cruisers. The later ships used a stripped-down version of the larger design. Simplification made them more suitable for rapid construction under wartime pressure. It did not automatically make them easier to maintain or modernise, since the larger Town hull offered more room for access and work. The design lineage connects classes whose names can otherwise make them look unrelated.