Perhaps you're just so accustomed to the old interface, it's really hard for some people to adapt to a new UI. People said the same thing about the "old" facebook layout, but nobody remembers that layout anymore. I'm sure we'll hear gripes about this new UI for a few months and then nobody will remember what the old hulu looked like.
Facebook didn't boost the font size, make posts take up a larger amount of space in the feed, add sluggish animations, hide information behind popups that take a full second to appear, etc.
(I didn't even know episode thumbnails had popups in the new design. Then I read jaredsohn's post and went to check. Then I thought it had a bug in Firefix because I couldn't get them to show up. Turns out I wasn't waiting long enough.)
There are some definite usability issues with Hulu's update.
