I had never seen it from that angle before, but I think you've really hit on something! I had just vaguely assumed that it was the vernacular that just made it too easy to freelance. But I see now I was thinking of means and not ends!
different options for just about everything in the NO gives them the feeling that, after all, anything is permitted
With some justification. I can't keep up with it all myself, and sometimes I find myself wondering "Is that really part of the Mass or is it made up on the spot?" (I refuse to use those Missalettes to follow something in my native tongue!)
not simply as a challenge to the NO in general, but to the “personal mass” they have constructed individually within the NO.
Yes! I do believe you've hit on something here. People get very attached to what they've "created." (When I taught sections of comp as a TA in grad school, one of the hardest -- and most important -- things to get across was that when I criticized their writing, I wasn't judging them, their hearts, their souls, their personhood.) What's that in Shakespeare? "A poor thing, but mine own." Only some of them seem to think "a wond'rous thing, and all mine own!"
I have seen this done in fact as opposed to only in thought. There is a priest I know who devotes tremendous energy to the readings to the point of using Bibles distributed during Mass to go through a long homily dealing with what the readings convey. The rest of the Mass, the Liturgy of the Eucharist, is almost an afterthought.
LOL! That's it!
I think the NO mass puts the focus much more on the priest himself than the TLM did. Obviously, there have always been some priests who celebrate more reverently than others, or whose Latin is better, etc., and therefore are preferred by the faithful. But now our focus is Father's personality and how he shapes the mass to fit that personality, how it becomes his vehicle for self-expression; and to not like this approach is to reject him in a very personal way, as far as he's concerned.