alt Hacker NewsDisclaimer: I am European AND Old, so I studied Latin for 8 years (Middle School + High School).
I am not sure I really understand your comment here. If you are studying an ancient language you acquire zero fluency in it. At best you can read it, unless you were lucky enough to meet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reginald_Foster_(Latinist) (and this would apply to Latin exclusively).
So it is a bit like saying, I dunno, "in terms of proficiency per unit of effort spent" playing Street Fighter is more "efficient" than practicing a martial art in an actual gym/dojo.
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I'm also old enough to have been forced to study Latin for years at school, on equal par with Spanish and French. I'm sorry I didn't take it seriously. Latin underpins so many languages, and a basis in Latin can help enormously figuring out strange words.
Indeed, I agree that you acquire hardly any fluency in classical languages with formal education. I suppose that I don't express this well, but I was trying to say that a natural language formally taught does not readily give you much fluency in it either, whereas immersion would give you fluency more readily and pleasurably.
My analogy would be more like this: learning dead languages in the classroom is to playing arcade flying games like how learning modern language in the sterile classroom is to a flight simulator, and immersion is pilot hours spent.
That is, with respect to acquiring skill in flying, time spent in a simulator is inferior to immersion-dominant learning, even with respect to acquiring skill for the simulator. It is in respect to the accessibility of immersion that I say that there is waste in classroom-dominant modern language learning. With arcade flying there is no such thing as arcade physics in the world, so with respect to acquiring what little skill is realistic, there is no better realistically accessible way.