There is still hope. There is a new generation of Catholics being raised at this moment that I believe will help bring back the beauty you mentioned. My children are currently enrolled in the Classical Liberal Arts Academy at home. We are small in numbers but growing at an incredible rate. My children are memorizing beautiful prayers, translating bible passages from Latin to English and we’ve only been with the school for a couple of months. I truly believe these children are going to change the churches around this country.
I pray you are right and that the pendulum is swinging back to reverence. I miss those days very much. I find it so distracting before Mass, which used to be a time of quiet prayer and centering, because our churches now sound like meeting halls.
This is my biggest complaint about emulating the Protestant worship practices: most of their worship seems self-aggrandizing. It’s too full of self. It is too heavy on the feelings/interactions we get as individuals and as a community and light on the worship between the individual and his God. I find their worship to be pretty, well orchestrated, and enthusiastic— but not reverent, mystical, or deep.
What I love about being Catholic is the intense relationship between me and the Lord. Even while I am in a large group at Mass, the focus is still on God, the mysterious Sacrifice on the altar, and very personal individual worship.