Metroid Prime 3 really lacks the atmosphere of the first two Prime games, so you're probably going to be disappointed with that one. (Still a great game though IMO)

I never had an issue with the menus in MP2. Personally I think the weird floaty rotating interface is really cool and I like it. My main problem with MP2 is the ammo system, which makes the game a lot less enjoyable to me.

I love it when the player UI is integrated into the game world. Shame Prime 2 dropped it. I haven't played it in coming on 20 years, so I'm wondering if I noticed that back then.

I think this is a totally valid complaint and felt the same way playing MP2 when it came out. I feel that first person games in general benefit from integrating HUD elements and menus into the game world more than other genres. MP1 was a masterclass in that areas, so MP2 was surprising.

Yeah, I really didn't like the menu change. Honestly Prime 1 is the best of the series in my opinion. 2 does have some impressive boss fights though.

The not in visor menu didnt bother me so much but that weird hologram style rotating around a ball type menu was tricky to navigate

The 3D rotating menu picker is cool in concept but I can attest that it took me longer to rotate it the right way the first few dozen times I tried using it. It does make a lot of sense how they broke down the log entries by a hierarchy instead of having all "research" in one long list though.

I think Prime 3's got the same lack of diegetic UI as Prime 2, mostly because they want to support having a mouse cursor style of control with the Wii pointer. Also they really liked hexagons when designing all the UI in that game.

I was not aware of prime hack. I’m going to give this a try as I’ve been wanting to play prime 2.