Why don’t you try cross-enrolling at UCI for a quarter or two and go from there? The enrollment period opens fairly soon and you don’t lose your standing as a UCLA student.
A major disadvantage with cross-enrolling is that you won’t have first dibs in class choices, but, given your scenario, it’s likely better than the alternatives. I don’t know how feasible it is with CS/CSE courses that generally don’t have open spaces, but it’s definitely worth exploring especially if you have advanced coursework completed that affords you to “burn” a quarter.