That's perhaps true, but not necessarily relevant to word length. Much of the added information in German relative to English is encapsulated in articles, which

That's perhaps true, but not necessarily relevant to word length. Much of the added information in German relative to English is encapsulated in articles, which are around 3-5 letters, which I suspect is not the most significant factor for German word length. As an aside, German also relies heavily on modal verbs (nearly as much as English does), far more than even related languages such as Spanish. There are many distant or unrelated languages with more informative verb conjugations/inflections.