I've studied Latin in school (and plan to do it again in the future, I'd like to be able to read it semi-fluently eventually). I really enjoy the language but I'd be extremely wary of using qualifiers like "powerful" for languages. That generally leads us towards extremely bad linguistics. Being more synthetic doesn't mean that you're more powerful per-se. You haven't said that exactly of course but I encounter this sentiment a lot in English-speaking circles, with people saying things like English is "dumbed down" or simpler because it prefers analytic constructs to synthetic ones. I also remember a Brazilian fellow saying that Brazilian Portuguese was worsening because people favored the analytic future "vou comer" over the synthetic "comerei" (which is amusing because this synthetic future comes from an analytic construct "comer hei", it's not the Latin future tense).
As a sibling comment points out, these features exist in may other languages, for instance Slavic languages such as Russian or Polish. Besides, even though this flexibility is theoretically achievable, in practice the day-to-day language is filled with more calcified idioms and ways of speech. You could, in English, say "to you this book I give" instead of "I give this book to you" but I'm sure most agree that's rather slanted even though I believe this is perfectly grammatical. A poet could write the former, but if you say something like that in colloquial speech people are going to wonder if you're having a stroke.
Judging the "power" and flexibility of Latin through the verses of Ovid is like judging English through Milton's Paradise Lost. Only educated speakers would come even close to even understand properly that level of language, let alone construct it.
Of course that's just speculation on my part but given that modern Romance lost the case system almost entirely it seems like there wasn't a lot of friction here. If common Vulgar Latin speakers really valued word shuffling surely they'd have found a way to maintain the cases I'm sure. I could also point out that in Russian (a language I've been studying a lot lately) it's very easy to build a sentence that seems grammatically right but sounds off to a native speaker. For instance Russian speakers tend to prefer to put locative expressions at the beginning on the sentence, so they say "on the table is the fork" instead of "the fork is on the table" which may sound slanted or putting emphasis on a different part of the sentence.
As a sibling comment points out, these features exist in may other languages, for instance Slavic languages such as Russian or Polish. Besides, even though this flexibility is theoretically achievable, in practice the day-to-day language is filled with more calcified idioms and ways of speech. You could, in English, say "to you this book I give" instead of "I give this book to you" but I'm sure most agree that's rather slanted even though I believe this is perfectly grammatical. A poet could write the former, but if you say something like that in colloquial speech people are going to wonder if you're having a stroke.
Judging the "power" and flexibility of Latin through the verses of Ovid is like judging English through Milton's Paradise Lost. Only educated speakers would come even close to even understand properly that level of language, let alone construct it.
Of course that's just speculation on my part but given that modern Romance lost the case system almost entirely it seems like there wasn't a lot of friction here. If common Vulgar Latin speakers really valued word shuffling surely they'd have found a way to maintain the cases I'm sure. I could also point out that in Russian (a language I've been studying a lot lately) it's very easy to build a sentence that seems grammatically right but sounds off to a native speaker. For instance Russian speakers tend to prefer to put locative expressions at the beginning on the sentence, so they say "on the table is the fork" instead of "the fork is on the table" which may sound slanted or putting emphasis on a different part of the sentence.