I'm still open to being convinced of saturnian verses' value. I assume (perhaps incorrectly) the following, which may simply show my ignorance, but perhaps these thoughts will be useful anyway:
1.) Just as a lot of hymns can be sung to more than one old hymn tune, and French alexandrines' mid-line caesura makes perfect sense when one hears the mid-line rest in those verses' musical settings, so too classical Latin and Greek meters probably originated with certain tune structures (now lost). By the first century BCE, lyrics seem to have been presented as poems without music, but saturnian verses are older and may have been more closely wedded to that musical presentation. Anyway, if you present your saturnian lyrics within a tune that fits them, your saturnian experiment may be more successful.
2.) Part of the appeal of any form is the audience's recognition of it and of the tradition within which it fits. Perhaps the saturnian meter fell out of fashion because it was regarded as too common and accessible, while the Greek meters implied that both the Roman poet and the Roman audience were assumed to be members of a well-educated elite. If so, the move from saturnian meter to Greek meters in Roman antiquity was a "let me show off my erudition while flattering yours" thing, rather than a rejection of an inherently flawed form. Which would demolish my implication above, that a form that became unpopular during antiquity did so because it lacked merit.
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