A main-line Protestant church is not a good comparison, because that hymnal that you find so old and boring probably doesn’t even date to the 1950s . . . at least 1000 years younger than the Mass. A mere blip on the time line by comparison.
Most of the hymns in that book were written several hundred years ago.
There is no requirement that church be boring.
"Several hundred years ago" rules out most of your typical hymnal content (at a minimum, 1810, before the Second Great Awakening). An Episcopal or Lutheran hymnal will have a few hymns from the 16th century German hymnals, and more 17th and 18th century hymns, usually English in the case of the Episcopalians. The Presbyterians rely heavily on the Scottish Psalter (1650).
But most selections in the typical evangelical hymnal date from after Moody and Sankey (the 1870s).
I find that the older hymns are more literate, more musically coherent and more joyful. "Joy" is different from "fun" - and more appropriate for worship of God.
Read Pope Benedict's take on modern music in church, The Spirit of the Liturgy. He's a scholar and a sensitive musician - and he really hits the nail on the head. Particularly here:
On the one hand, there is pop music, which is certainly no longer supported by the people in the ancient sense (populus). It is aimed at the phenomenon of the masses, is industrially produced, and ultimately has to be described as a cult of the banal. “Rock”, on the other hand, is the expression of elemental passions, and at rock festivals it assumes a cultic character, a form of worship, in fact, in opposition to Christian worship. People are, so to speak, released from themselves by the experience of being part of a crowd and by the emotional shock of rhythm, noise, and special lighting effects. However, in the ecstasy of having all their defenses torn down, the participants sink, as it were, beneath the elemental force of the universe. The music of the Holy Spirit’s sober inebriation seems to have little chance when self has become a prison, the mind is a shackle, and breaking out from both appears as a true promise of redemption that can be tasted at least for a few moments. [The Spirit of the Liturgy, (SF, CA: Ignatius, 2000), p 148]
The Church’s Tradition has this in mind when it talks about the sober inebriation caused in us by the Holy Spirit. There is always an ultimate sobriety, a deeper rationality, resisting any decline into irrationality and immoderation. We can see what this means in practice if we look at the history of music. The writings of Plato and Aristotle on music show that the Greek world in their time was faced with a choice between two kinds of worship, two different images of God and man. Now what this choice came down to concretely was a choice between two fundamental types of music. On the one hand, there is the music that Plato ascribes, in line with mythology, to Apollo, the god of light and reason. This is the music that draws senses into spirit and so brings man to wholeness. It does not abolish the senses, but inserts them into the unity of this creature that is man. It elevates the spirit precisely by wedding it to the senses, and it elevates the senses by uniting them with the spirit. Thus this kind of music is an expression of man’s special place in the general structure of being. But then there is the music that Plato ascribes to Marsyas, which we might describe, in terms of cultic history, as “Dionysian”. It drags man into the intoxication of the senses, crushes rationality, and subjects the spirit to the senses. The way Plato (and more moderately, Aristotle) allots instruments and keys to one or other of these two kinds of music is now obsolete and may in many respects surprise us. But the Apollonian/Dionysian alternative runs through the whole history of religion and confronts us again today. [The Spirit of the Liturgy, (SF, CA: Ignatius, 2000), pp. 150-51]