It seems to me that the evidence we have indicates that those who advised Pope Benedict in putting Anglicanorum coetibus together had two groups in mind for a target market. In the US, the initiative seems to have come from Cardinal Bernard Law, who initially proposed the Anglican Use Pastoral Provision in the wake of the same movement that resulted in the 1978 Congress of St Louis.
While the "continuing Anglican" movement is usually defined as comprising the breakaway denominations derived from the 1978 Congress and the episcopal consecrations that followed it, Fr Jack Barker also began talks with the Vatican at that time, facilitated by Cardinal Law, under the assumption that conservative Anglicans might choose some type of corporate reunion with Rome instead of forming new Anglican denominations.
I think this was a basic misunderstanding of Anglicanism. It's generally recognized that Anglicans have three factions, high church, low church, and broad church, with broad church dominant. The popularity of Tridentine vestments and gothic church architecture that swept Anglicanism generally since the 19th century has obscured this essential division. "Continuing Anglicanism" and the subsequent secession of the ACNA are low church movements, as was the Reformed Episcopal Church, which the ACNA has absorbed. (Web commentary I've seen notes that even the ACA, felt to be the highest of the "continuing" groups, is in actuality pretty low church.)
The October, 1993 meeting between Episcopal Bishop Clarence Pope, then-Fr Jeffrey Steenson, and then-Cardinal Ratzinger appears to have been an effort by Cardinal Law to reboot the Anglican Use initiative by bypassing the resistance of Catholic bishops, perhaps attributing an overall lack of enthusiasm for corporate reunion with Rome among Anglicans to certain Catholic bishops' resistance to the idea. I think it's significant that in the 1993 meeting, Bishop Pope pointed to a pent-up dissatisfaction with US Episcopal liberalization that could result in 250,000 Episcopalians coming over.
The flaw in that approach was an unwillingness to recognize that among those dissatisfied in TEC, most were low church, and in fact, "affirming" high church parishes in TEC are closely allied with broad church bishops. This is the sort of thing Frederick Kinsman clearly understood in the 1920s; it's hard to imagine how either Clarence Pope or Jeffrey Steenson could have been so obtuse in the 1990s.
The second bit of evidence for Anglicanorum coetibus's putative market is the Ordinariate liturgy, derived from the Church of England's Papalist movement. As I pointed out in a previous post, the Papalists were a very small high-church faction distinguished by an unwillingness to use the liturgy in the Book of Common Prayer, substituting either the Roman Latin liturgy in whole or part, or a "uniate" liturgy consisting of an English translation from the Latin mass that incorporates certain Cranmerian prayers. Fr Hunwicke has traced the Ordinariate liturgy now in use for the mass to an English Missal dating from about 1905, illegal in the Church of England but with some sort of naughty appeal to the small number of priests who used it.
The source I noted in my earlier post points out that on the whole, the people of the parishes where Papalist priests were incumbent at best tolerated the Latin or uniate liturgy or were drawn by the charismatic personalities of some Papalist clergy -- but the movement never had widespread popular support. This is borne out by the reported experience of UK Ordinariate parishes, where the people have deserted "uniate" masses in favor of Ordinary Form masses in nearby diocesan parishes, leading Ordinariate leadership to complain that this deprives the Ordinariate of a cohesive identity.
Again, it seems to me that the historical record has been clear in showing that the Papalist movement was esoteric and limited to a small clique of clergy. It never had large-scale popular demand.
