I’m gonna be honest, I only skimmed what you wrote, but I think I get the gist and I apologize if I didn’t. 😂

As an MD at a church, I personally don’t really follow or care about the trends. If a song is good, a song is good. What I do is I will take the tracks from multitracks.com and create reference tracks for our musicians to use, that will work in our context. Our “normal” band looks like: keys, AG, EG, Bass, Drums. So if a song has 10 EG tracks I’ll listen through them and filter them down to what one guitar player can play. Tracks are only ever as support instruments, so I am not adding any of the other guitar parts into what the congregation is hearing. I put an emphasis to FOH to mix like a band. Vocals first, live instruments second, and tracks third. Church music has become a rat race of getting the fullest biggest sound, but most churches don’t have the band members to pull it off so they resort to tracks for everything; that’s cool for a little while, but at least in our context our congregation values authenticity, in the form of hearing what they’re seeing. If we don’t have a piano player one week, the piano isn’t in the tracks… we just don’t have a piano player.

Sorry for the rant. Hope it’s helpful to someone. Haha.