the user experience of Federal Student Aid

In getting my degrees, I accrued some student loans. I don't mind this: they helped me get through school, and I have no problems with paying them back now that I'm out in the workforce.

After I got married last summer, I changed my surname, which has turned out to be more difficult than I thought. (Don't get me started about how it took me two faxes, four phone calls, two letters, and three months to convince United Airlines to update my frequent flier account.) And it's ongoing.

The latest one is the Federal Student Aid website. Today, I got an email from them with my new name on it, which I took as a good sign. It tells me that I've got a message from them, and I should login to the website to view it. So I go through the strange login system for the site (Social Security Number, first two letters of my surname, birthdate, and PIN), only to find that I have to apply for a new PIN since I've changed my surname.

Couldn't they just have kept my old PIN with the new name? Or, if that was somehow too difficult, why does the mail tell me to login to the website when I can't actually do it?