Yeah, and it was great.
You might not literally knock it prone, but you could stir it's core up and discombobulate it or something else that would impose the same penalty as prone, so it left it in the players' hands to get created rather than shutting them down with semantics.
Open flavor helps creativity instead of hurting it.
I'm going to try to reply to the whole slew of comments that piled up while I was asleep, but for now I'm going to stick to just this one since it so perfectly sums up the issue at hand. Great post.
The crux of the issue is that we both want creativity in our D&D games but we're talking about very different kinds of creativity that call for very different kinds of rules.
Let me explain.
Narrative Creativity
You're talking about narrative creativity, the ability to narrate your action in any number of ways. In 4e, various powers inflicted the "prone" condition on critters. "Prone" has various mechanical impact that is set in stone but those mechanical impact can be connected to any flavor you want. For example:
-Knocking someone over.
-Confusing them with chatter.
-Discombobulating them.
-Causing them to become dizzy.
-Hitting them with a whip and making them lose their balance.
Or a hundred other ways of narrating the set mechanical impact. The flavor is infinitely flexible and an enormous amount of creativity can be brought to bear here since it's so wide open.
However the flavor is so infinitely flexible because the flavor doesn't matter. No matter how you're narrating the power that knocks guys "prone" the mechanics are always the same. I've appreciated this kind of flexibility sometimes myself (for example reskinning the Ancestral Guardian Barbarian as a swashbuckler with "Ancestral Protectors" being annoying chatter and insults instead of anything supernatural).
By doing things like removing the requirement that the target speak your language, 5.5e Command does a better job of catering to Narrative Creativity than 5e command.
Tactical Creativity
Unlike narrative creativity where the mechanics are set in stone by the flavor is infinitely flexible, with narrative creativity the flavor is set in stone but the mechanics are somewhat flexible.
How this works is the text describes specifically how the spell/ability works in flavor terms and mechanics for the default way to use that ability. But then it lets players/DMs extrapolate off of that flavor about how that spell works to MacGyver it or to provide sanity testing to allow the DM to make rulings when the mechanics directly contradict the flavor (i.e. "no you can't trip a gelatinous cube").
For example, if the PCs know they're going up against a cleric who loooooooooooooves casting Command they can prepare for that in various ways:
-Hire mercenaries who don't speak the cleric's language.
-Make a HUGE amount of noise so that nobody can hear what the cleric is saying.
-Stuff their ears full of wax so that they can't hear the cleric's Command like Odysseus' crew with the sirens.
-Get so drunk that they don't understand what the cleric is saying (this would be a very stupid solution that I wouldn't let work as a DM, but I've seen a lot of harebrained PC plans in my time...).
All of these cunning plans to avoid the power of the cleric's Command rely on the flavor of command being set in stone and NOT having any narrative creativity allowed. They also rely on there being some flexibility with the mechanics of Command so that the flavor ("dude is telling you a single word and once you hear it you have to do it") actually mean something at the table.
Under 5e rules I think "you're immune to Command because your ears are so full of wax that you can't hear naughty word" is a fair ruling since the spell only works if people can understand what the caster is saying. While I don't think that sort of thing really works with the 5.5e version of the spell.
By doing things like removing the requirement that the target speak your language and removing the freedom to choose your own verbs, 5.5e Command takes a big steaming dump on the ability to apply Tactical Creativity to command.
Compromise?
Neither of our approaches are better or worse, but they are different.
In a lot of ways 5e was a compromise between these two approaches. It didn't really give me what I wanted, it didn't really give you what you wanted, but we were both (presumably?) fine playing it as enough of a compromise.
For me 5.5e tears up that compromise with things like the change to how Command works. It's not that 5.5e changes all that much, but it changes enough to make it worse for me than 5e and shows that the WotC people are not interested in catering to the kind of creativity I like in D&D in the future.
At the same time that 5.5e brings back 4e's approach to fluff vs. crunch (building a big wall between them made out of tigers with tigers on top), it doesn't bring back the things about 4e that I liked (my poor lost healing surges, how I miss you), so it's not really doing anything for me aside from giving some martial classes much-needed buffs.
