Livius,
People follow mindlessly when they don’t know what alternatives there are. Right now, on EWTN, the routine Sunday N.O. Mass is one of the most solemn Masses you can ever see. Tell your “pew mates” to watch one! And then, wait for the Masses on the TLM coming on September 14.
It took 40 years to get here from there. Pope Benedict is backed by the Holy Spirit. That is how the situation should be.
Oh, it’s definitely possible to celebrate the NO better than it is usually celebrated - using the Roman canon, not ad-libbing, taking care with the gestures, etc.
But much of the ritual aspect is missing from the NO and just as some priests try to add their own personality to the mass, others try to add a level of ritual to the NO.
There are virtually no actual rubrics in the NO for things which, in the old mass, were carefully dictated (gestures, in particular). We have one priest who celebrates very carefully - using the hand positions and gestures from the TLM. But there is very little in the NO that is prescribed or proscribed in writing.
Furthermore, the rearrangement of the parts has led to a change in emphasis. The addition of a third reading does make it very easy to regard the “liturgy of the word” part as more important than anything else. Furthermore, the conscious and intentional removal of the sets of three from gestures, words, etc. left the ritual “unbalanced” and certainly very different in pace and rhythm from the TLM. (My suspicion is that this was done by the zealot modernists of VatII to horizontalize and desacralize the Mass, because 3 is traditionally a sacred number and Three is particularly significant to Christians.)
So while it can certainly be celebrated better, I think it has some fundamental flaws. I suspect that one of the hopes of BXVI was that the two forms would interact in such a way that there would eventually be momentum to revise the NO and deal with some of these problems.