The world rendering is different than before, but in a less unpleasant way than I expected. I wholeheartedly agree about the UI though. A chaotic mess of styles, typefaces, colors and scales. Also the font rendering seems a bit wonky in places, like when you mix system rendering with text rendered to bitmap on a different engine.

But civs are like shoes, the new ones never fit as well as those that are already well worn in.