The liturgist Edmund Bishop famously described the genius of the Roman Rite as soberness and sense, and the phrase has stuck because it names something real in the texts. Where other ancient rites multiply litanies, repetitions and poetic elaboration, the classical Roman prayers are short, tightly constructed Latin periods that ask for one thing at a time.
The Mass in this rite falls into two great halves inherited from the early church: a service of readings and prayer that all could attend, and the eucharistic action proper, from the offering of bread and wine through the Roman Canon to communion. Around that skeleton the rite gathered its proper chants, the body of music later called Gregorian, and a calendar of feasts and fasts that organised the Western year. Because Rome was the see of Peter, churches across Europe borrowed its books as a mark of communion and of correctness, and rulers found in the uniform Roman liturgy an instrument of unity.
The Carolingian court in the eighth and ninth centuries requested authentic Roman books, supplemented them where they were incomplete, and spread the hybrid result across the empire; much of what the medieval West knew as Roman worship was this Franco-Roman blend. The rite therefore carries layers, Roman restraint at the core and northern enrichment around it, and liturgical scholarship spends much of its effort telling the layers apart.