I would love to help out with something like this, but I haven't had much time to do CC modding lately. And the time I do have is allotted to finishing my own game balance tool. I think there are a few people still around that get involved but, a lot of the old tools for poking at the game need updating so it's hard to bring in new blood.
My initial thought is that the game rendering for the UI is probably layered somehow, so you might just play around with an emulator to see if there are any options that turn off layers. I seem to recall old versions of the standard emulators didn't address this properly initially so things like the world map item menu wouldn't show up at all.
