I think PG meant that succintness and power are approximately the same. Ron seems to be taking PG's statement to mean power is defined as succintness, and then breaking that.
Just as atomic mass was just a proxy to the true period law for Mendeleev, I see succintness in terms of syntax tree nodes as a proxy for the true definition of power, which would probably be more like the amount of space a program takes to hold in one's mind. Given that, of course binding-block would reduce power, as it would require one to add meta-tags to the assignments in one's mental code tree.
There's another very obvious counterexample: assertions. Buried within the source code to ArcLite is an assert function and several assertions. These are not strictly necessary; the functional behavior of a program is the same whether or not it has assertions. But they were very necessary for debugging, and they continued to catch other bugs long after they'd served their original purpose.
The upshot of that whole piece is that when making things terser we have to be careful not to make them impenetrable. Not sure that is much of a scoop. I worry about that every time I name a variable or function. It might be an answer to those complaining that Arc is just a bunch of macros atop Lisp: part of the hard part for PG may have been maintaining that very balance between brevity and obscurity. And I hear E=mc^2 was considered obvious by some once Einstein wrote it down. But I digress.
