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Your explanation of how hymns inappropriate to the liturgy became part of the mass is very interesting. Basically what you're saying is that they essentially eliminated the high mass, and then allowed popular devotional material to be integrated into a low mass. In other words, it's why modern American masses feel so familiar to Lutherans and Methodists nowadays.

I'm away from my home computer, but will make some comments by way of describing how Orthodox chant works.

First, there is no high/low distinction in Orthodoxy. One either does the Liturgy or one doesn't. It is always sung/chanted (the terms are interchangable -- I prefer "chant", since it is a term that can't be used for inappropriate forms of music. One can hardly say that a choir "chants" a florid Italianate Russian setting of the Cherubic Hymn.

The position of the reader/psaltis/canonarch/chanter is still a very important one in Orthodoxy -- in the Greek practice in particular, there is a strong tradition of having one or two men who chant the responses, either leading the congregation, which joins in on the fixed and familiar parts, or doing it without congregational participation on the variable material.

The bottom line is that one doesn't need a trained choir to do sung services, although it certainly adds "polish" to the services. Timothy (Bp. Kallistos) Ware has a beautiful passage in "The Orthodox Church" that describes the reaction of an Englishman to attending a service in a little room in London where a priest, a deacon, and a solo chanter did a service by themselves that took his breath away.

My next comment is that older monophonic forms of chant, Western or Eastern, can easily be chanted well by one or two chanters, or by a trained choir. Once Catholic music made the turn into polyphony, it became the province of trained and even professional singers. There are parts of our services that should be sung by the trained singer(s) on kliros, and the Russians adopted some pretty florid stuff that requires a top-notch choir and isn't material on which it is easy for people to sing along. But in general, traditional chant forms in the Orthodox Church are actually fairly easily learned by the congregation over time with repetition. I would assume that the same is true of basic traditional Western monophonic chant.

As a side-note, when I browse through modern Catholic missals, the songs I encounter are just plain hard to sing. They use odd intervals, odd syncopations, etc... They look simple on the page, but I can only imagine what they sound like with a congregation trying to sing them. By contrast, we have chant melodies that look tough on the page, but in practice they are easily memorized and applied to text by people sight-reading material. Again, there has got to be traditional stuff in the ancient Catholic tradition that would do the same thing.

The other very important point that I touched on earlier is that the currently used Orthodox liturgical tradition that has done such a tremendous job of teaching and preserving the faith is not just our Divine Liturgy. Most parishes do Vespers on Saturday evening or Matins on Sunday morning, and many (like mine and Kolokotronis's) have both. There is a lot of fixed and variable material in these services. All has been "scrubbed" over centuries of use for beauty and doctrinal purity. The Orthodox parish norm is actually the monastic cycle. In practice, the entire cycle isn't done, and there are some abbreviations, particularly at Vespers and Matins, in many parishes. But the standard toward which we all look is the full monastic daily cycle.

Catholic parish practice has mostly devolved over the centuries to a single service. It is why so much damage was able to be done just by reworking that one service in the NO. Part of this is the result of having services that were not in the vernacular. But again, these services and hymnology very much exist in the Western tradition -- why aren't they being used? There are multiple traditional "canons" of the mass in the Western (and Eastern, for that matter) tradition. Why weren't those used if they wanted variety, instead of these newly composed things? There are countless pieces of patristic hymnology that are there, most of them translated into English. Why weren't they pressed into use. I guess I just don't understand...