I may be more inclined to finish that sentence "than damn near all...", but it's not that I'm opposed to contemporary forms. I just think the older songs force my focus on the lyrics in particular, and makes what I'm doing distinct from the day-to-day listening pleasures that I generally prefer as music.
A song with more well-written lyrics will generally focus attention on those lyrics. Doubly so if it's designed for a group of people to sing. I'm only guessing here, but I don't think the words to most hymns would have seemed "dumbed down" at the time - they're in what would have presumably been modern vernacular when they were written, but they're still verbose and descriptive, partially owing to the structure often being several verses rather than verse/chorus and maybe bridge. Each time you go through that verse, you have new information, and it helped that preachers and theologians were often the writers.
But I don't think that's to the detriment of the music in most cases. Speaking as someone who gets really sick of playing G, C, D, E minor, it can be refreshing to play a hymn and have a more generous sprinkling of chord variations. Arguably this may have kept church music out of the hands of the common person for a while, because back then you probably had to know how to play a pipe organ or at least a piano and figure out all of those different voicings, whereas nowadays, pick up a guitar and learn four chords and you're good to go.
Interestingly, even though I spent my early childhood in a very traditional church, I didn't learn a few of the hymns that are now my favorites until my college years. "O, the Deep Deep Love of Jesus" and "Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing" come to mind. Even though I was all gung-ho about contemporary worship at the time, I came to appreciate the blended approach (both in the same service, contemporary spins on hymns that don't make them unnecessarily difficult to sing, etc.) more than any segregated approach.
Regarding the notion that it's distinct from the music that you listen to for fun... assuming well-written lyrics, how would you feel about worship music that took on more of a current-day, experimental/indie sort of musical style? Assuming they were really being inventive with the music for themselves and not just aping Radiohead's style or whatever. I don't know how feasible such a thing is because part of the aesthetic with some of that music is that the lyrics are more esoteric and don't need to have "a meaning" or even discernible words in some cases. But just throwing that out there to see what you think. Because I suspect part of our problem with contemporary worship is the same as it is with popular music, to a degree - that the style gravitates toward the middle of the road.
