The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[nablator]

the rules for breaking Latin words into syllables are straightforward

Not really: there are some difficulties especially if you use medieval Latin without phonetic distinction of v/u, i/j and exceptions to the basic rules if you want to do it right, like prefixes that you're not supposed to break so you need to check the etymology...

the total number of possible syllables is relatively limited

I estimate it to 800-1000 in long texts (without many exotic words), more than double what Mandarin has (~400).