Quite a wide ranging and ambitious thread. I’ll address the basic question raised in the title, and one particular subthread, seperately.
I’ll make comments on random elements here. (part 1)
That said, I only have a few comments on Middle Eastern socio-religi-politics; I’m not Middle Eastern, will never visit there, am honestly not remotely interested especially since this IME become heavily invested in extended-family or patron-client groups, and know very few first generation immigrants (and I’m not really interested in debating about that time period with the ones I know). (does this make me unsuitable for any kind of non-western Christianity?

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That’s fine, but IIRC Lebanon itself is heavily a franco-maronite creation in the first place?
Interesting; could you please discuss this a bit more? The only thing I heard of was IIRC then Cardinal-Ratzinger’s “cool down” comments to the Melkite Synod’s “Zoghby initiative”, which honestly was very premature even to me who broadly supports the sentiment.
OK, I probably count as intelligentsia: what do you think I should do to bring my parish back to full Orthodoxy?
Agree with these three comments.
From my perspective, having briefly dropped the “byzantine rite” to go back to the “Latin rite” for the Liturgy of the Hours, the point of the old stuff is to connect you to generations of Christians who came before you and pray the same prayers that greats like St. Ambrose supposedly prayed. For instance, in the current Latin liturgy of the hours (universalis app) begins with a hymn for each hour. The default are some perfectly nice English hymns, but you can also click and choose the traditional hymns of the hours in Latin and English. I find the traditional hymns not only beautiful and theologically better grounded, but also it is quite something to be praying the same hymns many saints have sung over over 1000 years.
Same thing of course goes with the psalms: you are praying the same thing (albeit in various translations) that God inspired people to pray for millenia.
The Latin church in the early decades of the last century did a remarkable job of bringing back Gregorian chant from basically extinction.