The new UI sucks beyond believe the solution indeed is using Horizons for outfitting purposes, why cant the designers think for a moment do put it back the way it was ?
As for fancy theories about "be designed for virtual touch screens or VR" are crap, even this was true the simple fact that you cannot know what engineering you have in a module unless you equip it speaks tons about the capacity of the designers this was simply done to look "better".