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" the net effect was to make Catholic worship more like what goes on in a modern liberal Protestant church than like the worship of the Orthodox church..."

My guard goes up and I am deeply suspicious of some of the ideas behind the changes in the theology of the Eucharist. At my previous parish we were told often that the theology of the Eucharist had changed since VII. I wonder if behind all this there is the idea of "radical kenosis" which is a liberal Protestant idea and may have come from the Rhine theologians as well.
This is the idea that God poured himself out into his Son who poured himself out into humanity and then disappeared altogether. So in essence we are Eucharist only to each other. Jesus may still be in the tomb. The vertical has disappeared and only the horizontal remains. Most Catholics of course don't believe this, but this may be exactly what the Rhine theologians had in mind when they pushed for changes at VII.

I don't know what exactly the Rhine theologians did or didn't actually believe (although I have a suspicion, as you obviously do, too.)

I grew up in conservative Protestantism, then lived through the liberal onslaught in Protestantism, then explored Catholicism seriously by reading pre Vat II sources, then encountered post Vat II Catholicism in practice, and finally converted to Orthodoxy.

I have therefore read widely and attended a multitude of different "brands" of churches over the decades. One learns very quickly to spot what kind of theology is about to be taught by the code-words and ways of talking and writing about theology.

And as a "multi-lingual" :-) guy, I can tell you, that modern Roman Catholic theological and liturgical ways of talking/writing are pretty much a barely altered liberal Protestant language, which has its roots in German Protestant higher criticism, etc...

It is not like the language of conservative Protestantism, "old" Catholicism, or Orthodoxy. It has "liberal Protestant" written all over it. That doesn't at all mean that modern Catholic theology is just like modern liberal Protestant theology -- just that this is who modern Catholic scholars have chosen to sound like. I personally feel that this reflects definite theological sympathies with liberal Protestantism in some cases, an academic "inferiority complex" in other cases (we see this in Orthodoxy to some extent, as I have previously noted), and in other cases it is just something that has been innocently learned by imitation. In all cases, I think that this language has an eventual effect on the theology being taught.

If you want to find out whether your priest, for instance, buys into the "radical kenosis" idea, by the way, just ask him to tell you what happened at the Ascension, and then as a followup what will happen at the Second Coming.

The Church is clear on both of these things: Christ ascended into heaven in his glorified human body, and He will return with that same glorified human body. "In the same way" as the disciples saw him going up, the people on earth will see him coming down -- but this time with the angels, etc...

Listen not only to the words -- listen for "side-stepping" language, and watch body-language.

Orthodox priests have a hard time getting by with such ideas (and frankly if they had them, they wouldn't be much interested in being Orthodox priests, generally), because our hymnology is just chalk-full of very retrograde theology on things like this. And because the Byzantines loved to repeat things in a dozen different ways (that's why our services are so long) -- there is just no room for equivocation. By the time one gets done with Vespers and Matins of the Ascension, and of the Last Judgment, there is little room for mistaking what the Orthodox Church teaches!