Your implied criticism of the liturgical reform mandated by Vatican II is accurate. The current Roman Rite of the mass bears little resemblance to the glorious liturgy that was celebrated for nearly 1500 years in the west. The horrible bungling of the reform of the liturgy is another reason to bemoan the "romanization" of the Christian west. The preservation of other ancient and unimpeachably orthodox (lower case "o") liturgical rites would have served as a safeguard against the introduction of the liturgical concoction that has been foisted upon us. The gradual elimination of most of the other ancient rites in the west after Trent is something else that this Pope has expressed regret over. One can never be sure but there is hope among orthodox Catholics that one of the items high on Benedict's agenda is fixing the liturgical mess.
Yes, those of us who are Orthodox students of the liturgy very much bemoan the loss of the other Western liturgies.
While the basic service books, liturgies, and texts in use in the Orthodox Church are pretty much identical, there are slight variations in different traditions and manuscripts. Also, because of the length of the services as prescribed by the Typikon, the services are generally abbreviated somewhat, and the types of abbreviations vary from tradition to tradition.
Added to this are the differences in chant tradition. Most Orthodox countries have chant traditions that have grown organically over the years, ultimately drawn from Byzantine chant (which ultimately is on a continuum with early Hebrew worship and chant.)
Here in America, there is a fair amount of eclecticism within Orthodoxy. The basic underlying tradition of my parish is Russian, but there are bits of things that have worked their way in from Greek practice, chant melodies from Carpatho-Russia and Galicia, etc...
As you say, this slight variety has a protective effect, since if one liturgy is forced from the top down, and it is lacking in traditional grounding -- then you're really in a bad way. Furthermore, any changes to the liturgy that happen organically can be examined for their theological and spiritual implications, and bishops can put a stop to the practice or correct the text after comparing it to usage elsewhere.
A committee, on the other hand, can become a law unto itself. There are places for such things, but only within the strict guidelines of examining deviations from the patristic norm -- not inventing new liturgies out of whole cloth.
Another protective effect for us is that we have adopted the full monastic cycle as the norm. Of course, no parish does the full monastic cycle, but most parishes at least have Vespers and/or Matins in some form. Most Russian Churches read the 3rd and 6th hours before Liturgy. Our parish's cycle is Vespers and Compline on Saturday night, Midnight Office, Matins, and Liturgy on Sunday morning. Vespers is very well attended, and attendance is generally considered to be, along with frequent confession, a part of preparation for receiving Communion. Compline is chanted during confessions, so those waiting for confession hear it. Usually only the priest and the reader is there for the chanting of the Midnight Office early in the morning, and folks drift in during Sunday morning Matins (it, like Liturgy, is about 1 1/2 hours.) The sheer volume of the texts (the Orthodox service books take up about 20 volumes of text for a year's worth of services) means that there is a lot of repetition and recapitulation and restatement of belief. And there are no "options" in the services -- there is just the one set of texts, one anaphora for a given liturgy (and one can't choose which Liturgy to use -- this is prescribed.)
To change the Orthodox faith would require banning or rewriting all of this -- an impossible task. By contrast, since post-Tridentine parish practice had boiled down to the Mass alone, and so the revisionists had only to alter the one service to change the entire way that Catholics looked at worship and the faith.
I'm not sure how B16 is going to go about restoring the sense of the "given-ness" of liturgy (his term), but I will be interested to watch from the sidelines.