Actually, you made some very good observations which I did not talk about. Namely, that many of the documents of Vatican II were actually ignored, in favor of the “spirit of Vatican II.”
+Like Latin is to be retained as the language of the Church?
+Such as Gregorian Chant is to have "pride of place" in the liturgy?
+Like girl altar boys, and remodeled sanctuaries, and removed altar rails that were never mandated by Vatican II?
+Like clown "masses" and dancing liturgies which were never suggested by Vatican II?
Bring back the Missal of 1962 as now freed by His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI!
I think it’s easy to say that VatII was good and then the evil “spirit of Vatican II” came along and ruined it.
But one of the problems with the original documents is simply that they are very vague, wordy committee-products that were not even meant to be very rigorous from a doctrinal point of view. VatII was a pastoral council, and in fact as such I don’t even think it had the capacity to define doctrine.
However, there was enough room in the original documents to provide every person with the interpretation that suited him best. And with the breakdown in authority - which I do think had much to do with the concept of “collegiality” in VatII - people just felt free to read these tantalizingly vague remarks any way they wanted.
I don’t think the initial impulse of VatII was evil. But I think something that needs serious consideration is to what extent evil managed to insert itself, via concepts antithetical to established doctrine (although not necessarily confronting it directly and by name, so to speak), into the documents of VatII and the Novus Ordo. The “spirit of VatII” couldn’t have gotten away with all that it did if there had been no justification for it in the Council itself.