Liturgical Reform- a personal view

Today, for it is after midnight, is one of those days when, even before I discovered the Blogosphere, I was inclined to declare "Under the old calendar this would have been Sexagesima Sunday." I qualify that statement because I have been struck by how extraordinarily prevalent the world of the Extraordinary Form and its calendar appear to be in cyberspace. As one who recalls attending his first mass in English at the age of nine on the First Sunday of Advent 1964 and subsequently saw a whole series of changes leading up to the new missal in 1970 I feel entitled to speak with the authority of experience. So listen up, you young whippersnappers!
During that period I attended two masses on most Sundays, a low mass and a sung mass (Yes, I was in the choir) and so I can confidently assert that the most striking effect of the reform of the liturgy was that of turning most Catholics into liturgy critics. The fact is that before that event there wasn't much to talk about. Father So and so's sermons may have been a bit long or another priest might have been the subject of a speed warning: "If you are five minutes late he will have finished the Gospel." Now there was a lot more to do. We were sitting down and standing up more often and then we had changing translations. "Et cum spiritu tuo" first became "And with you" before becoming "And also with you." I certainly remember that but I also have a sneaking suspicion that we had two differing translations of the Gloria and Credo before we got the current one.
There were people who grumbled. Even as a child I was aware of that but for the most part we accepted that we were living in changing times. The Second Vatican Council was not over before changes started and clearly, whether we liked change or not, there could be no better authority for what was happening than it be mandated by an ecumenical council of the Church and the Pope himself. The good news in 1970 was that this was the definitive change and an end to the tinkering of the previous five years. What did become clear about the new mass- and very soon- was that unlike the old mass the personality of the priest became a major factor in one's experience.