My guess, the original controls were just like that. But, US marketing lives and dies by 'feature creep' and 'new and improved', even when "new" isn't "improved" at all.
One issue will be the question of how the power supply converts the low voltage AC output of the transformer into DC to power the cell -- if it's just diodes and capacitors, then you can probably bypass the board. But if it's a transistorized switching power supply, the power circuit is probably part of the same board as the control circuits, and will be hard to bypass or replace.
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