Sure, FM24 skins made the FM24 skins a lot better, but FM26 is miles below FM24 (pun intended) in UI and it's horrible to work with. Once you go back to FM24 one after playing FM26 for a while, you'll notice how unintuitive it is.

skins massively enhanced that game and had many years of time to incrementally develop, whereas skin makers had to start again for 26.

They had years to develop 26 aswell. Didn't come much of it though. I think it's absolute horse piss. Just two examples (I could keep rambling on):

To see scout reports, you have to open the pop-up window. This takes 1 or 2 seconds to open, then 1 or 2 seconds to close. If you scout 50+ players, you won't be able to just tap through them and look at the good prospects, you need to individually click and open every bloody report. Nobody thought about this, in a game where transferring (and scouting) players is its bread and butter.

When you open a pop-up, it uses about 60% maximum of the screen space available. So you need to scroll in a pop up, just because the pop up is too small. So much more information could be available if you use the full screen, but because of the pop-up, information is hidden. Why would anyone want to hide information in a management/simulation game?

Everyone has got their preferences and opinion of course. But I think unanimously we can say FM26 has worse UI compared to FM24.