Most vegetable oils are predominantly some type of unsaturated fatty acid - that is, monounsaturated or polyunsaturated. This type of fatty acid is a liquid at room temperature ("oil"). On the other hand, saturated fat is a solid at room temperature, which is easily demonstrated with butter or animal fat (lard) - which are primarily what vegetable shortening is supposed to substitute for.
Wikipedia has a breakdown of the various types of oils and the proportions of fat types. What's important to note is that while the majority of oils have little to no saturated fat, palm oil in particular is approximately on par with butter, and coconut oil is actually higher than margarine (the most common hydrogenated vegetable oil product).
In fact I've actually never heard of "coconut [oil] shortening" - the idea baffles me because coconut oil is already quite solid at room temperature. It doesn't need to be processed any further to be used as a substitute for butter or vegetable shortening. It's not quite so simple with palm oil though, and there is a "palm shortening" which is different from palm oil.
Hydrogenation is, in a nutshell, converting unsaturated fat to saturated fat by adding hydrogen. Most of the time the hydrogenation is not 100% complete which also leaves trans fats. Palm oil isn't quite as solid as coconut oil so it does need processing in order to be used as a shortening, but hydrogenation is not required; all that needs to be done is to separate the saturated (solid / stearin) fats from the unsaturated (liquid / olein) fats. This is done through crystallization, which is completely different from hydrogenation.
Some companies may indeed also put the coconut or palm oil products through an emulsification process to add volume or make it easier to work with, but that is entirely incidental; these products are made solid due to the very high amount of pre-existing saturated fat and the removal of all or most of the unsaturated fat.
To sum it all up, it's not hydrogenation that makes fat solid at room temperature, it's saturation (of hydrogen atoms), and hydrogenation just happens to be one way to achieve saturation. For products already containing plenty of saturated fat, hydrogenation would be redundant.
I have used Midel brand ginger snaps, graham crackers, and lemon snaps in crust recipes and they all happen to perform well in standard recipes. They do in fact have a better taste with respect to the snaps; the graham crackers I didn't notice much return on investment. The wholesome ingredients are not detrimental to their ability to be pressed into a shell.
I would recommend trying the recipe as-is first with the Midel cookies. My guess is that you are concerned that they will be too dry or something to that effect, or would crumble rather than bind together. For a shell like this I would be sure to parbake and grease the pan with shortening rather than any kind of spray. When you remove the crust, if it seems drier than usual, I would brush a minor amount of canola oil over top.
If you want to improve on this with respect to things you can likely buy at a natural food market, I would begin by greasing the pan with coconut oil and brushing with walnut or almond oil oil. This will also add $3 to the cost of your crust.
In general, Midel bakes well as far as my experience has gone.
Best Answer
There is no way to know what they meant when they said "homogenized" - this really sounds like marketing-speak.
But if you are trying to whip shortening with water, you will need emulsifiers. I could imagine that the Spry already had them in. The "With cake improver" sentence in the can also points in this direction, as cake improver often contains lecithine.
You can try normal vegetable shortening. If it does not whip but stays separated from the water (it will probably break up into tiny droplets swimming on the surface under the mixer, but if you let it sit around for a few minutes, they will start coalescing into larger droplets, with the tendency to join into a single oily layer on top of the water), then throw it out and make a second batch, but add an emulsifier to the water first. Lecithine, xanthan, or guar will all work. Then you will get a really whipped shortening, something of a poor man's hollandaise. Work this with your flour.
You must be aware that while the crust made this way will be tender, it won't be flaky. A flaky crust is flaky because it is made from two different textures, the flour-fat mixture and the flour-water mixture, and they separate each other in sheets after kneading. If you mix the water and fat into a whip first, you will not get any flakes. You will get a shortbread crust, which is fine - it tends to be the standard pie crust in continental Europe. But if your goal is flaky, then you should follow the traditional cutting method, Kenji's easy flaky method, or the traditional boiling method.