My sister's church, which leans heavily toward the praise choruses, did a Christmas Cantata last year.  
During a slide show, they sang excerpts from traditional, well-loved Christmas carols, and the congregation sang
two or three of them during the service.   But during the main part of the cantata, I suddenly found myself wanting to scream!
On reflection, I realized that the drum beat reminded me of the old disco days, when the same beat would be played continuously for hours.  
Every one of the new Christmas choruses they sang had the same moderately slow 2/4 (maybe 4/4) beat, with a strong back beat and a latin-ish sounding syncopation. This was so overpowering that it distracted me from any differences in the words or melodies of the various choruses.

On a similar note, I heard a parody of a very popular praise chorus
("I Could Sing Of Your Love Forever") a while back.   It went:
"I could sing the same line forever,
I could sing the same line forever,
I could sing the same line forever,
I could sing the same line forever..." (repeat, fading out).

I'll admit that many of the old hymns had unnecessarily flowerly language (characteristic of the poetry of their time),
many of the tunes/arrangements were befitting a marching band, and the theology was sometimes questionable at best
(e.g., one line of "God Will Take Care Of You" asserts "...Nothing you ask will be denied...")--
many of them, that is, would not pass muster on Susan's well-thought-out critera.
But many were set to tunes by Haydn, Bach, Beethoven, beautiful old folk tunes, or other muscially interesting and pleasing melodies.
(FWIW, I can play most of the melodies on my guitar, and I'm not a regular user of "jam buster" chords.)
 

If the classic songs of Gershwin, Berlin, Arlen, Porter, Ellington, and others can be revived (after the de rigeur hiatus of the adolescence
of the offspring of the first generation of folks who loved them), if classical music survives across generations in the secular arena,
and if some of the old spirituals and Gospel songs are also appreciated by multiple generations, why should this not also be true of Sunday morning church music?
I thought the idea was that over succeeding generations, we tend to discard the poor and mediocre songs of an era and keep the gems.

Genie

BTW, John Hardly, I think you're onto something, there.
 

One more comment:  There was a time when "awesome" was the kind of word one would use for God and not for a new skateboard or for Britney Spears's navel.  Given its overuse in Valley Girl parlance, I find the word rather irritating in the context of most praise songs.  In "How Great Thou Art," the line "Oh, Lord, my God, when I in awesome wonder consider all the worlds Thy hands have made ..." expresses the truer meaning of the word -- I am filled with awe, my wonder is full of awe.  As an adjective to describe the object being considered, the term seems a misuse.  God is awe-inspiring (and maybe the skateboard is, too, but I have yet to see a skateboard that good).  It is my feeling for God that is "awesome"--not God."  [Yeah, yeah, go on and give me the lecture about language being a changing, living thing.  But I've told you why the contemporary use of "awesome" in praise choruses rubs me the wrong way.]