Actually, the point was NOT to face Jesus in the tabernacle (remember, in many very old and/or famous churches - in St Peter's Basilica, for instance - there is not and never was a tabernacle on the high altar), but to face East (even when a particular parish church did not really face east, the orientation of the altar was called "liturgical East").
The best current discussion/explanation of this is in Cardinal Ratzinger's THE SPIRIT OF THE LITURGY (chapter 3: The Altar and the Direction of Liturgy Prayer, pp 74-84). That chapter is essential reading for presenting the theological/liturgical reasons in favor of the practice.
But your conclusion is absolutely correct: that would go toward about 90% of eliminating the sorry spectacle of Mass as "The Father X Show".
Of course, as long as anything is in the vernacular, some priests will not be able to resist the temptation to "ad lib" - and that's the other factor that fuels "Mass as Entertainment".
It has been said that the new Mass - rightly or wrongly - was put together by a commission of academics and monastics. Academics know enough to know what they don't know, so they would not be inclined to ad lib. Monastics are trained in the self-effacement of communal life in which the Holy Rule and the customary of the house - not one's personal whim or supposed wisdom - determine what one does and doesn't do, down to the least detail. THEY might actually OBSERVE an Order of Mass.
The average priest in the parish, neither an academic nor a monastic, faced with and facing the people feels (or sadly has) the need to "communicate" with them - and he's fluent (more of less!) in the language - so ad-lib away!
Anyhow, read Cardinal Ratzinger for an eloquent presentation of the rationale behind East-ward facing liturgy.
That is scary. Have you ever been to an American monastery? The vast majority of them look like modern Catholic churches. Ugh!
Compare our monasteries (deliberately ugly) with beautiful European monasteries, and it is night and day.