Apparently folks need to be reminded: there is no reason you’re forced to use the TM interface if you do not like it.
Instead, you can in Finder navigate to your TM hard drive or SSD and just choose which backup from the long list of folders there which use the backup time stamp as their name. Navigate within those as if this were your actual Data partition. Thanks to Apple’s TM snapshot magic, everything there will appear as it was during that backup. Everything. Not just whatever got updated during that instance.
There are things that are more convenient through the TM interface, but if you detest it, there is nothing forcing you to stick to it rather than just browse your TM backup as just any other disk that happens to hold your backups.
So everybody gets to be happy — those that like the TM interface and those that hate it. 