But Catholicism just seems deeply uncool and sterile.

I was raised Catholic down in Texas, and there really wasn't much of a difference between them and the local Lutherans or Methodists. Plenty of families with kids in the suburbs of Houston and Galveston. So the local Catholic schools and adjacent public schools had lots of young people doing young people things. The Church hosted plenty of big festivals and other community events which ranged from your annual Christmas Schmaltz to parking lot carnivals to movie night lock-ins and choir groups and generic youth mixers. All this stuff was in walking distance, in a suburb where there wasn't much else to do. So the Church actually was one of the coolest and least sterile places to hang out.

And by the time you got to high school and sex/drugs/etc wasn't just stuff the TMNT told you not to do in movies, plenty of your Catholic peers were happy to hook up or hook you up or whatever.

Like if you’re a statues and symbolism type of person, why not paganism?

Because nobody else in your town does paganism (openly, anyway) and your parents didn't just kick in $10k to the local dioceses to do a big Winter Solstice Under the Stars event that all your friends are going to.

That's not even to say my school didn't have its share of Marilyn Manson wanna-bes. But if you had to pick out the cool kids, they tended to be the ones with the big families and the nicest houses and all the money. Those people also just so happened to be Catholic.

Go out to Utah and its the same thing with Mormons. Go down the Atlantic Coast and all the old-money extended families are Baptist or Methodist. Go out to the Midwest and I guarantee some of the coolest people in town will be Lutheran.