So I would welcome any thoughtful criticisms or suggestions to this end.

Thanks for your thoughtful efforts. In case it is helpful, the list of deletions should also include the sentences about "Nazis" and "rats." These statements really do not help you to make your case.

I'm not clear what you are referring to in the part about the "Soviets." Since it appears to delute the case you are trying to make as well as disincline the reader to be particularly sympathetic, it is also a candidate for change/deletion.

Isn't out loud the earlier practice? Fr. Taft seems to think so and has mentioned it in a number of his books.

… They said it aloud. They didn’t perhaps proclaim it because of the bowing over, but there’s no question about the fact that all the prayers were said aloud. The people were incapable – the person in Church by himself or herself said their prayers aloud. We know that from ancient culture.

[T]he Byzantine liturgy was not a way of teaching doctrine and was not intended to be. It was not a display of the Christian faith in a way acceptable or attractive to onlookers. What impressed onlookers about the liturgy was precisely its utter lack of an ulterior purpose, the fact that it was celebrated for God and not for spectators, that its sole intent was to be before God and for God "euarestos euprosdektos" (Romans 12:1; 15:16): pleasing and acceptable to God, as the sacrifice of Abel had been pleasing to God. Precisely this "disinterest" of standing before God and of looking toward Him was what caused a divine light to descend on what was happening and caused that divine light to be perceptible even to onlookers.

To speak, as has been common since the 1950s, of a "missionary liturgy" is at the very least an ambiguous and problematic way of speaking. In many circles of liturgists, this has led, in a truly excessive way, to making the instructive element in the liturgy, the effort to make it understandable even for outsiders, the primary criterion of the liturgical form. The idea that the choice of liturgical forms must be made from the "pastoral" point of view suggests the presence of this same anthropocentric error. Thus the liturgy is celebrated entirely for men and women, it serves to transmit information--in so far as this is possible in view of the weariness which has entered the liturgy due to the rationalisms and banalities involved in this approach. In this view, the liturgy is an instrument for the construction of a community, a method of "socialization" among Christians. Where this is so, perhaps God is still spoken of, but God in reality has no role; it is a matter only of meeting people and their needs halfway and of making them contented. But precisely this approach ensures that no faith is fostered, for the faith has to do with God, and only where His nearness is made present, only where human aims are set aside in favor of the reverential respect due to Him, only there is born that credibility which prepares the way for faith.

“The Spirit of the Liturgy” by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI):
In 1978, to the annoyance of many liturgists, I said that in no sense does the whole Canon always have to be said out loud. After much consideration, I should like to repeat and underline the point here in the hope that, twenty years later, this thesis will be better understood. Meanwhile, in their efforts to reform the Missal, the German liturgists have explicitly stated that, of all things, the Eucharistic Prayer, the high point of the Mass, is in crisis. Since the reform of the liturgy, and attempt has bee made to meet the crisis by incessantly inventing new Eucharistic Payers, and in the process we have sunk farther and farther into banality. Multiplying words is no help – that is all too evident. The liturgists have suggested all kinds of remedies, which certainly contain elements that are worthy of consideration. However, as far as I can see, they balk, now as in the past, at the possibility that silence, too, silence especially, might constitute communion before God. It is no accident that in Jerusalem, for a very early time, parts of the Canon were prayed in silence and that in the West the silent Canon – overlaid in part with meditative singing – became the norm. To dismiss all this as the result of misunderstandings is just too easy. It really is not true that reciting the whole Eucharistic Prayer out loud and without interruption is a prerequisite for the participation of everyone in this central act of the Mass. My suggestion in 1978 was as follows. First, liturgical education ought to aim at making the faithful familiar with the essential meaning and fundamental orientation of the Canon. Secondly, the first words of the various prayers should be said out loud as a kind of cue for the congregation, so that each individual in his silent prayer can take up the intonation ant bring the personal into the communal and the communal into the personal. Anyone who has experienced a church united in silent praying of the Canon will know what a really filled silence is. It is at once a loud and penetrating cry to God and a Spirit-filled act of prayer. Here everyone does pray the Canon together, albeit in a bond with the special task of the priestly ministry. Here everyone is untied, laid hold of by Christ, and led by the Holy Spirit into that common prayer to the Father which is the true sacrifice – the love that reconciles and unites God and the world. (pages 214-216)