I don't find the skill screen to be quite as hard to use as some, but it's certainly not a great UI by any measure. My idea for a replacement is four screens - a summary (6x3 table with numbers for skill level and progress bars), and three screens (combat, magic and stealth) showing the relevant constellations/skills in something that looks like an actual sky. The three sky screens would be fairly minimal by default, but with full hover behavior. It may even be possible to click individual stars/perks from the sky screen without zooming. Zooming to a constellation would present a much flatter view of ALL the stars (PC users aren't generally sitting 10 feet away on the couch), avoiding the annoying pseudo-3D angled plane navigation of the default interface.

I can probably work out the coding, but I'm not sure I have the artistic talent to do the project justice. We'll see what (if anything) the Creation Kit provides for UI modding.