I think the new building tool is a huge improvement over the previous method of needing to craft everything out of the player inventory screen. The only thing that I run into every once in a while is being unable to remember which category a specific decoration or building piece is in. It would be nice if there were still some sort of filter search where you could type in the name of the item and it would lookup from all categories and find it for you.
The current system looks like it will be much more friendly for console users, but on PC I think filter options are often incredibly useful when a game has so many different items the player needs to keep track of.