TwentyFiveMinuteClasses
I think this is an effort to take more time away from teaching professionals so that Home centered Church instruction can dominate. Parents and Individuals need to become the gospel scholars, not a small group of elites to which we are intended to sit at their feet and praise them as gospel intermediaries.
I had a Catholic priest friend who taught me about such intermediaries. He had a vision where his superior, the Bishop, was receiveing inspirtation from the heavens and glowed with the knowledge he had. There was a beam of light from the bishop that fell on him and he was joyous. This is a very catholic idea, the concept of intermediary priests.
I am not a Catholic. I believe every person can have inspiration from God through the Holy Spirit. I don't know what Catholics think of such a thing, a nation of prophets and priests, such as what is talked about in scripture. In the book of Mormon, we have little teaching about hierarchies in the church, in fact, for most of the chronology, there was no Church as we know it. From Lehi up until Alma the Elder, no church beyond the family structure. A similar pattern held sway in much of the old Testament, especially from Adam all the way through Abraham and up to Moses, where the concept of the Tabernacle was introduced. The synagogue happened somewhere in there, but without a clear revelation from God dictating it. Devotion to God was a family and national structure.
I often think in modern times that we are going back to this older ideal. Joseph Smith never spoke of community worship centers particularly - only of temples commanded of God. I find our wards and meetinghouses to be a nod toward Protestantism and giving new converts somewhere to go that felt familiar - a building and priest/pastor model of religion that is quite alien to the methods of the Patriarchs and Israelites.