DukeNukemForever: I have the same opinion. Especially the font is awful, hard to read and bad looking. The gaps between the columns is too big, in general the font is too small. For a game that's ¾ of the screen is text and the game itself is about reading (stats, story) that's not a good decision. While the pictures of the adventure window look fibe and the decorations of the text box is ok the whole screen looks very empty. Change the font and raise the text size and they would get in my eyes easily a much better result. Just compare to the original
graphics of the amiga version, which looks thanks to a different font and bigger text size much fully and compact.
wvpr: There's room for a larger font, but not much. They would have to shrink the picture and main text window to give the status chart enough vertical room to grow. The empty space comes from stretching a 4:3 column layout into widescreen format.
If the whole screen had the same level of detail as the picture frame and the text scroll, it wouldn't feel so empty. Many versions of the original game had a decorative frame surrounding the whole screen. They could decorate the empty areas of the remaster like many other classic RPGs, although leaving it empty makes it easier to adapt the screen to different resolutions. They could also bring the columns closer together with room for an additional column at the end.
Maybe I should not judge now and wait what options are available (font size, screen resolution, windows mode, etc.). I checked the screenshots again and it seems that the font size of the text box is changeable, so maybe there are more good options we don't know yet that allow us to customize the layout.
The good thing if they had in mind to port these games to different devices with different screen sizes and formats is that the layout needs to be flexible. Text can be flexible, as it can be flowing and so you can easily change and move it. In worst you could also use decoration to frame it, as you mentioned it. Many websites do this when you change the window size, they change the text location or put a frame around the text box, because text and statistics should be compact that you easily can overview them. On a 4:3 display, especially on a small screen like in the old days or today on an iPad, it's ok to use the whole width for 6 columns. On a big and modern 16:9 monitor it's a bad idea. Just an example, to see the class of one of your characters you need to look first on the left edge for the name and then to the right edge for a class. On a modern 24" that are 50cm and that's too much.