You're entirely right about your worries, and I genuinely do feel there's a decent chance this approach to the game won't be fun, or won't be playable due to the information load required. I consider this new direction to be an experiment. I can't tell what it'll play like, it's too different from what I've seen or tried before for me to judge. On the other hand, it may succeed, and could be great if it does. I had a bunch of ideas which came about from Shadows, so wanted to try them out to see how they played.
If it succeeds I'll continue, and move over stuff from the older approach to this one, to create a better whole. If it fails I'll take the ideas which seemed to work from the experiment and continue with the previous version.
As to the UI, I assure you I don't deliberately ignore the UI aspect. In fact, I'd say that at least 75% of the current experimental build has been UI work. The AI and internal systems were relatively easy to design and implement and were done a couple of weeks ago, while the UI is still being assembled. The issue may simply be that I'm not a very good UI designer, and that this project is difficult to design UI for. That said, the Shadows UI has slowly been improved over time, as I realised issues with it from testing gameplay and fixed them, so there's still hope even if the first version is a bit difficult to use.