Whether it’s a calque or a descriptive expression, I think the main problem is still that it addresses only one term. You encounter a term that has no good translation, invent your own translation, start using it and maybe it’ll eventually catch on. But then you have to do the entire dance again for the next term.
Yes, I agree.
Consider the use of Latin phrases in Europe in XIX. century. It was, back then, seen as beautiful, literary and high-status. If the same could be achieved today with English, it would allow small language communities to break out of the language cage.
I think it depends on education in the community. Yes, for example, Leo Tolstoy in “War and peace” wrote even vast fragments in French. But most of his readers knew French well. (Almost exclusively well-educated person had time for fiction reading.) Now despite mandatory learning in school at least one foreign language many Russians know very badly even Latin alphabet (not to mention rules about reading English words). If you are writing/translating something for specialists, you may ignore that. But if you are writing fiction or something for beginners, you need to think about that.
And yes, we have problems with declinations. It is hard to read sentences in Russian with words which cannot be declined by language rules.
And I often think about the problem: If a reader knows English and sees words, for example, “taboo tradeoff”, I think they can understand that “tradeoff” is about changing something to something. And due to that they can understand the whole term easier. If a reader doesn’t know English, they see only some strange letter set. I think it may be important in writing text for beginners.
In Russian word “taboo” was introduced too. Problem was with a term “taboo tradeoff” as a whole. We had thought that a literal translation may produce wrong connotation or no connotation.
In Russian we have many adopted words too, but, yes, it is more difficult due to declinations and conjugations.