What the people want

Giving the people what they want?
What is the point of a liturgical choir when liturgical music is pushed aside in favor of pleasant hymns?

How did the Church end up with the Liturgy so badly celebrated as it is today?

The Liturgy mongers earn a fair share of the blame, but not every country in the world is as obsessed with profit as ours; the ars celebrandi, if my observations are accurate, have deteriorated just as badly in places not as thoroughly in thrall to the forces of hype and commercialization as we.

In the main, it seems that the weak-willed or merely lazy chose the path of least resistance, and gave their loudest constituents what it seemed they wanted, even if only at that moment.

(It is the same mind-set that has produced a society of diabetics adults, from the raw material of twinkie-loving children.)

"Pastoral judgement" seems to me not so much over-used as mis-used.
As the snarky but erudite md at Our Lady of Fatima says, one owes one's employers, i.e. congregation, one's judgement.
Look at the crap, the utter crap that went on at the LA RelEd conference -- it is understandable (if pathetic,) that the members of the seminar-attending classes, most of whom drank the school of education kool-aid, are going to buy into it.
But when they return to their home-bases and try to foist their silliness especially on the children, but also on the parish as a whole, the grown-up in the family ought to say, I'm sorry that at Samantha's house Mr and Mrs. Call-Me-By-My-First-Name let you stay up all night and watch whatever you wanted and eat whatever you wanted, but I don't want your mind and your teeth to rot, so here's what's for dinner and no, you can't watch Showtime for Adults.
Giving people what they want, or what they find "comforting," or at least using that as the main (in some cases, SOLE,) criterion is bound to backfire eventually.
If you poll for "favorites" you are going to end up with junk that is inappropriate in the present and will prove embarrassing in the future.

I suppose if we put it to a vote majority rule would give up nice vanilla-scented Glade instead of incense.........