A quick question (I'm not a new recruit btw lol)

Is there anyway to change back to the old HUD? I mean, is there anyway to make the items and stuff look the same as in before sprites and dash and stuff?

Unless you could get to the code no, even then that is against TOS, plus you wouldn't have access to sprite actions (or at least wouldn't see reload speed)

You don't need to go into the code to change graphics/music - most of those resources seem to be loaded from your harddrive as needed.
While I haven't gone as far as trying to change them (I've only looked), as of this post, it looks like the graphics for some of the old icons are still in the rsrc/ui/hud folder, and the new graphics are in the rsc/ui/hud_v2 folder. If it is possible, you'd have to do a lot of work of your own to reskin the UI to look like the old one (and even then, it'd get deleted the next time you update SK). It's probably not worth the effort, so I'd advise against it :P

You would need to change the code to move things around on the HUD though, so as to actually be the old one. Until you do that, you can only change the resources back to looking like they did. Not that I've done that, of course.
Yes I said and stuff twice in the same sentence! XD