When I first read this message, I thought I was going to like the change, but now that I've fooled with it, I don't like it.
Much like Dale Byers, one of my main uses for the scratchpad was as a ready-reference list of hard-to-remember templates that I frequently want to transclude into profiles. My other main use is as a reference list of URLs for unadvertised WikiTree pages like the category watchlist. The new format improves the page's usefulness as a reference list for URLs, since formerly I could only copy the URLs and paste them, but now I can either click on a link or copy the URL. However, the new format makes the scratch pad almost useless as a reference list for templates. Instead of seeing code that I could copy to generate a template, I now see the whole (sometimes LARGE and UGLY) template that the code generates, and now I have to open the scratch pad in edit mode to see the template code. I tried inserting wikicode format codes to see if they would prevent the interpretation of the template coding (I tried the paired codes <nowiki></nowiki>, <tt></tt> and <code></code>), but that doesn't work.
I recognize that I could create a scratchpad file on my own computer to store WikiTree template codes, but I prefer to have them on the WikiTree site because that makes them available on any computing device I am using and because I only use them at WikiTree.
As Bob Jewett has noted, there are other places on WikiTree where a user can store useful URLs, but the scratchpad has been the only place where a user can store their own collection of useful template codes.