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I think Benedict did try, and I personally found him very much to my inclinations and tastes (even things like the change of the processional staff to something more old-fashioned).
But he suffered from (1) succeeding the rockstar charisma of John Paul II where he was quiet and scholarly and didn't have the personal oomph to ride over the progressives and (2) having been painted as the Rottweiler, Palpatine, all the rest of the negative press that got going pretty much since he was elected. Trying to go back to more disciplined forms of liturgy doesn't work when a chunk of the faithful have been born and grown up under the new forms so have no memory of the old; those who do have the memory of how it used to be are either too old to make a difference, or are liberals who hated the old style anyway.
The Vatican II reforms were never meant to be taken as far as they went, but a lot of liberals at the time seized on them as "Gotta get rid of all this, the Council says so" and literally chopped up churches (there's a church in my town that was built in a conventional Victorian Gothic Revival style, nothing spectacular, really off the shelf, but it was destroyed by being hacked about over the years. The altar is now what I can only describe as a bundle of sticks. The laity sure didn't want the altar rails taken down and the rest of it, it was all down to the clergy). The ideals of going back to simpler, Gospel-oriented worship were great, but the effect was that schools now left teaching up to the parents, the parents thought schools would continue teaching the basics, kids never got the basics and Christian Doctrine classes (as they were in my time) now became all about what you could call social justice discussions.
There's a reason for the joke about "When God saw the Church was no longer suffering persecutions, He sent liturgists".
So Benedict was standing in a razed-flat wasteland trying to get the people who had only known that to come back to the way it used to be, and the press was too busy laughing about his red shoes to try and understand what he was doing.
God rest the man. He at least stood at the tiller and tried to steer the ship.
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