Great topic.
I will throw my hat in this thread as another South Carolina boy familiar with NewSpring. In the interest of full disclosure, I visited the main campus for two conferences, attended the Myrtle Beach campus on a couple of occasions, and do listen to sermons on-and-off online.
With the recent attention on megachurch pastors and congregations, I do get a little bit skeptical of putting on a show. I think this is a legitimate criticism that can be leveled with great accuracy at a megachurch. However, I also think this could be leveled at a smaller church when the pastor preaches on fire and brimstone, if it's done in the wrong spirit.
However, when I attend NewSpring, I look with awe at the faces around me. People from all walks of life are being pulled in to church. These are people who, by traditional definitions, don't belong. They're young, rough looking, or whatever.
To tie this all back to the OP, in my view the RPW does try and organize an order to worship that is based off a template from the Bible. I respect that, and the first question for worship, IMHO, should be does this glorify God? The concept of RPW is very valuable for this question because there is a mooring to stay connected.
What concerns me, however, about the RPW is that it can be abused to start questioning things like instrument choices. While I sympathize with there being a point in which something is indeed too loud and distracting, do we really want to tread down the path of suggesting that God can only hear good music when it's on key and the acoustics are just right? It's hard to distinguish, for me, precisely where personal preference and RPW-like anchors meet.
Do we also want to head down the path of arguing, necessarily, that older is always better? (Just for the record, I am pretty sure that the Eastern Orthodox would win that fight.)
It is interesting to look into the advent of hymns and how there was controversy when hymns were adopted as opposed to exclusively singing psalms. To me, the focus should be on the content versus the medium. For instance, yes songs these days aren't as deep and involved as hymns, for the most part. I get this concern and agree, to a point. Yet, I see battle lines forming along the lines of contemporary vs. traditional moreso than looking into the actual content.
If you want to argue that repeating God is good 30 times in a song is not the best worship and use of church versus a theological hymn (or contemporary song/hymn), then that seems to be a valid argument. (I agree that some worship songs are a little vapid.) I find that sort of argument much more profitable than trying to dress up "I don't like the way that sounds!" in some theological gossamer.
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