Related to this, comparing my overall experience with the legacy UI, I think one of the things I missed the most about the UI stylings from before was the information density was higher. The search bar being wider let me easily see and enter a large number of words at once, which I use a fair bit, but I also increasingly notice that the new left search pane also reduces the information density because there are a lot of new UI elements (the Chinese | English tab takes up a number of pixels) and the result is that when I am using landscape orientation on my iPad, because the keyboard is often up (since I just entered a word), I can only see 1 matching entry and have to click again to dismiss and scroll. The older UI was much more compact, and comparing it head to head, I can see 3 entries in the search results with the keyboard up before I have to click to scroll, which I really liked.
The bounding boxes in the definition pane on the right give more contrast, but I also find those eat up pixels also reducing the information density. This is less of a problem, but also something I notice.
Sounds like this would be a fairly big change to get a more classic-styled UI, but FWIW, I really did like being able to see so much more information in the old UI. Thoughts?