The rail industry seems to have a habbit of trying to solve one problem, but creating others in the process, sometimes ones that were worse than the original problem.
Ticket machines used to work by having the customer select the destination and ticket type, the problem with this is on some journeys there are a dizzying array of tickets with different validity rules.
So Northern have moved to their machines to a system which is largely planner based ("iirc with the exception of the tickets shown on the start screen, which are still sold in the conventional way). This solves some of the problems, but create new ones. Firstly they are much slower to use. Secondly they won't offer services that are departing imminently, presumably because of fears that people will buy a ticket and then complain that they can't use it. Thirdly like online ticket sales they are totally reliant on the "electronic" restrictions, which don't always line up precisely with the actual contractual restrictions on tickets, because the rail industry seems to be incapable of designing an electronic restrictions system that can handle the complexity of the contractual restrictions on it's tickets.
The workaround for those in the know is to just pick a train that has the ticket type you want available, even if you don't plan on actually using said train, but it's a bit much to expect regular customers to know that.
The large screens also seem to be a case of this, presumably they were introduced to better accommodate passengers of different height (kids and wheelchair users, VS standing adults), but it seems to have come at a high price in terms of responsiveness of the screen.
Fortunately the gaurds seem to be on the passengers side, you just have to hope you run into a guard before running into revenue protection staff.
