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.
