I don't know what "good in terms of religious practices" means, nor do I understand its relationship to the population being fed up. I might have a feeling of what you're trying to get at, though, so let me attempt an answer, and we can go from there.

From approximately the middle of the thirteenth century, there is a shift in the forms of "popular" piety. This is complicated, but for our purposes here what's important is that there is a growing fixation on the Eucharist. The Lateran IV council in 1215 saw the first mandate that everyone was to commune once a year, and about this time the practice of withholding the cup (which lasts to today) began to become more widespread. Soon after, we start seeing an increased number of communion-related miracles - the appearance of the baby Jesus in the bread as it is raised at the alter or someone (usually a woman) being sustained on her weekly communion alone - and the emphasis on the actual communion ceremony as the important part of the mass. There are in fact stories of women running from church to church to see as many Hosts raised as they could, to get as much effect as possible.

This emphasis on the material sounds a bit foolish and superstitious to modern ears, but I would caution you not to shrug it off. The sentiment behind it - the belief in a real, living, and present God - was there, and it was powerful. Among other things, the idea of Hell is a terrifying one, and a universally held conviction. The solution is penance and atonement. In the early middle ages, this was more or less completely restricted to the monastic sphere. The crusades, which first promised simple penance for, but eventually full remission of, sin are one of the earliest examples, and the theology behind the crusading remission is strongly linked to the idea of the indulgence. A person who formally vowed to go on crusade who could not fulfill that vow physically could effect the same end with a payment, and eventually this formed into the simple expedient of paying money for the remission of sin, which is what an indulgence is.

Again, this seems crude, but recognize that it fills a very real spiritual need, and the papacy was more than happy to oblige. Not only did it help the needs of the faithful, but moreover the papacy always needed money. This was especially true in from the fourteenth century onward. In the thirteenth century the papacy was deeply involved in trying to prevent the HRE from obtaining Sicily, something that would effectively surround it, and freedom from secular control was a preoccupation of popes from the fifth century (see here). Moreover, under the reign of Boniface's successor, Clement V, the papacy moved to Avignon. This was not totally unusual, at first. The pope frequently left the city, usually because the Romans rioted a lot. What was unusual is that the pope and then the papacy stayed in Avignon for 70 years. This required huge sums of money - everyone needed a new palace. Although the papacy returned to Rome in the 1370s, this was not a decision all agreed with, and on the next papal election the college of cardinals split, and there were two popes, one in Rome and one in Avignon.

This situation lasted for some 30 years, and was considered both deeply shocking and a sign of the apocalypse to most Christians. An attempt to depose both popes by a council at Pisa in 1409 only resulted in three papal claimants - all of whom needed money to run their respective courts and convince people to follow them. Finally, the Council of Constance (1414-1418) deposed all three popes and electing Martin V, who ruled in Rome. Incidentally, the Council also invited a dissident rebel named Jan Hus, leader of the Hussites, who among other things were demanding communion of both kinds (ie. bread and wine), to have himself heard. Hus accepted under the guarantee of safe passage, whereupon he was seized and burnt at the stake.

The resolution of this papal dispute through council breathed excited Church reformers, who saw councils as an effective way to cut through the red tape of the papacy. The papacy, of course, saw it as a threat to their power, and Martin delayed calling any other councils (though he was in theory obliged to do so every 5 years by the decrees of Constance) until he called the Council of Basel shortly before his death in 1431. Martin's successor, Eugene IV, promptly told them all to go home. This was not generally appreciated, and so the Council first tried to censor the pope and then deposed him, electing Felix V as antipope. The Council had no real power to physically remove Eugene from office, so effectively all they had done is re-opened the schism, an act which made pretty much everyone disgusted with the idea of councils. When Eugene managed a short-lived reconciliation between the Catholic and Greek churches in 1445 (Constantinople would fall to the Turks in 1453), this PR coup put the final nail in the coffin of the idea of church councils.

The papacy of the later fifteenth century thus went unreformed, and lived like princes. The great works of art such as the Sistine chapel (named after Pope Sixtus IV, who commissioned it) and St. Peter's itself were completed in this period. The popes themselves were fantastically profligate. The notorious Pope Alexander VI, the Borgia pope, apparently once had naked prostitutes race for chestnuts for his amusement, and he was different only in degree, not in kind, from the other Renaissance popes.

Despite all this, most historians agree that in 1510, the idea of the Reformation's final form - a complete break with Rome - was inconceivable. What sparked Martin Luther's success?

First, Luther wasn't an idiot. When invited to a church council under the auspices of the pope and with a guarantee of safe passage, he refused. He'd read about Hus.

Second, what drove Luther to nail his theses to the door of the church was that self same fear of hell and craving for the personal presence of the divine present in the spirituality of the later middle ages. How great the reaction, then, when Luther told them that the primary method proscribed by the papacy - the indulgence - didn't work.

Third, the printing press, which led to more rapid dissemination of materials.

Fourth, Luther was supported by several secular princes for various reasons.

Fifth, many, many other things.

Hope that helps. Some further reading:

• Vauchez, André. Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages. Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

• Bynum, Caroline Walker. Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women. The New Historicism : Studies in Cultural Poetics. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987.

• Bynum, Caroline Walker. Christian Materiality: An Essay on Religion in Late Medieval Europe. New York : Cambridge, Mass: Zone Books ; Distributed by the MIT Press, 2011.

• Duffy, Eamon. The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, C.1400-c.1580. 2nd ed. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005.

• Kieckhefer, Richard. Unquiet Souls: Fourteenth-Century Saints and Their Religious Milieu. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984.

I don't know what you mean by "positive for the Catholic church". Can you clarify?