For the last two years I am bending Drupal UI as much as possible and approach it rather differently than I did before. Hacking the modules is not a scarry part of the development process anymore, while keeping the patches with changes available for later upgrades. It does come with a price that you have to be careful and review every upgrade, but it also has its benefits in freedom of doing it your way. Sometimes the workarounds (Drupal way) takes longer than changing one line in the code and usually these changes are often not re-usable and of no use to others.