As you say, you don't study Latin for its own sake. My Latin classes taught me a lot about more about grammar, syntax and language structure than I got from oth

As you say, you don't study Latin for its own sake. My Latin classes taught me a lot about more about grammar, syntax and language structure than I got from other languages, and I think a big part of that is exactly because it's a dead language: since you don't need to teach pupils how to read or write, all effort can go into reading comprehension and text analysis, and eventually language theory. Also, my teacher (at least for most of the years) was a language historian and would speak a lot about language development from proto-indo-european to greek to modern-day romance languages. For example, being aware of the r<->l and h->f consonant shifts from Spanish to Portuguese allowed me to more easily recognize unknown words when learning the latter.