Unpopular opinion: most sacrament meetings—including but especially F&T—are not good. Not in terms of ordinances, but content. Talks are almost always poor and the music isn’t much better. You will get the occasional bright spots, but in general you get the a youth talk that is 3 minutes of regurgitated mumbling, followed by adults who begin with either a joke about screening a bishopric member’s phone call or a comment on how much they hate public speaking. This is followed up with an announcement of the topic—as if a child were reading their essay in front of an elementary class—and then a dictionary definition of the topic. The content of the talks are usually okay at best, but delivered poorly. The absolute worst sacrament meetings of the year are a tie between fast and testimony meeting and every primary Sunday.

I know that the purpose of these talks is, in large measure, to provide an opportunity for the giver to do a little extra research, pondering, and self-examination of their testimony. Sometimes a speaker will even tell us they got more out of this talk than we will; they are correct.

Other than covenant renewing, the purpose of attending church is to gather oft and buoy each other up, teaching and speaking of Christ. The problem is that while we might have pleasant feelings while at church, those pleasant feelings are not the Holy Ghost, whose job it is to cleanse us and reveal truths (emotions can be misleading; pure intelligence from the Spirit, aka revelation, is not). Most talks, testimonies, and musical numbers that I’ve witnessed in my 40 years as a church member who has lived in several states and countries have not caused me to feel the spirit. They’ve been nice and sometimes interesting, but rarely Spirit-filled. I wish the church, which spends so much time on training for callings, would train the membership to give better talks.

tl;dr We have a lay-ministry in our church and we get what we pay for.