hMonkey
AFAIK Houdini's 1.0 global ui scale equates to 85dpi, from there you can easily adapt the global ui scale to match your monitor's dpi scale for consistent results, while keeping everyting at Normal setting, additionaly you could modify the fonts size.
I agree and so far I have wasted way too much time on this than I will ever admit publicly. However, things don't always work out nicely when you've a custom ui scale set on windows, which as far as I remember Houdini doesn't account for. But anyway, after I have to set a custom UI scale in Houdini because it has different icons sizes all over the place, so even if you can see the text some icons are just too small, or the reverse, if you can see every icon, the text may not render right for you.
Then you have to customize fonts etc...
This is bad, because I opened blender for some reasearch into it recently and I had a small heart attack at how nicely it renders text.