The fact that they increased the height of the "tilted" letter E shows that they do not even understand their own logo. The E is not only rotated 45 degrees counterclockwise, but tilted backwards away from the observer. This is why, if you simply rotate the "E" upright, it still does not look normal, but is somewhat slanted like an italic font. If you tilt the letter forward or backwards you get the final effect of the slant. However, the secondary effect of tilting the letter forward or backwards is that the letter will appear shorter and thus there is no need to increase the height of the letter, which you might need to do if it were a simple 2 dimensional rotation as opposed the the rotation in combination with the tilt. I can see that this is what the original designer intended, but he/she was not consulted in this redesign. Thus the new logo loses the consistency of the original design, and in my opinion is now broken.
Oh, yeah and I agree it was and still is ugly.