Louis Boyer and the Shipwrecked Reformation: Liturgical Embarrassment

I read the following quotation from Boyer's Liturgical Piety and found it insightful so am sharing it here. Great for a theological discussion topic.

But it may be said in fact that, in this field as in many others, the Reformation was shipwrecked not because it was too daring, although this has often been said, but because it was much too uncritical of its own assumptions, the assumptions generally common at the end of the fifteenth century. The so-called Reformers imagined, for example, that a return to the primitive liturgy meant taking the low Mass as tie norm, suppressing everything in the Canon except the actual words of the Institution of the Eucharist; enlarging upon penitential features of the low Mass, such as the Confiteor; and, in general, not only centering everything on the memory of the Passion, but reducing everything to it...

With regard to the Eucharistic celebration, the Caroline Divines were imprisoned in the frame of worship already elaborated in the Prayer Book, a frame which abandoned in practice almost everything that was most primitive in the Mass. Everywhere in this field, therefore, we can see their obvious embarrassment. Only by returning to the undivided Church could they have regained the ground on which to build up the true Christian worship in its fullness. And since they were not prepared to make such a return, they could devise nothing better than a via media, a compromise in the worst sense of the word. In spite of their abortive efforts to reinstate a doctrine of the Real Presence and at least some of the features of a sacrificial Eucharist, they were tied to the Prayer Book. Not only did that frame of prayer with which they were determined to be contented at any cost preclude their rediscovering the traditional Eucharist in any practical or effective. fashion, but, what is far worse, they could not recapture what is only to be recaptured in the true Church, that is, the full and organic intuition of what the Christian Eucharist is in its wholeness and in its unity.