Also, as far as the oldUI, if you get far enough back you can still use it. It used to have an option of newui vs oldui.
Also even after they took it away, it was still in there and you could hack the exe to use the oldui. The old ui is now completely gone from the exe.
Check out some old posts at
http://macroquest.sourceforge.net. They are the ones that figured out the hack for the old UI at the time.