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Thanks, Karina!

If your goal is naturalism, there are a lot of benefits to taking the historical approach. So much of the interesting parts of language come through historical development, especially the fun features we find more natural sounding. Some things that historical conlanging can help you with are:

Interesting phonotactics and phoneme distribution: If a language has some oddly specific phonotactic constraint, it's probably changed something. For instance, Spanish very specifically bans initial /s/ + consonant clusters and adds /e/ before them in foreign loans. Look into it and they actually added that initial /e/ before all Latin /sp st sk/ clusters, and that constraint sticks today. My Ndăkaga doesn't have any initial clusters with /j/ because any cluster of consonant + /j/ either became a palatal consonant or was simply lost.

Irregularity: What I call "regular irregularity", where some inflectional paradigms differ from the default in some particular way, come from history. Spanish "shoe verbs", where you can have verb stems alternating e <> ie or o <> ue come from vowel breaking rules you can observe elsewhere interacting with stress shifts in verb conjugations. Even less predictable irregularities, like English strong verbs, have historical sources (in this case, Proto-Indo-European ablaut).

Dialects/sister languages: If you want any dialect variation or a language family, even if you're not planning it now, you'll probably want to work historically. Mark Rosenfelder observed a couple decades ago that working forward from a protolanguage is much easier than working backward. For a small example of why you should have a protolang first: in my interview with Paul Frommer, he mentioned that, when adding a new Na'vi dialect, he had to manually go through and decide which words had /i/ vs /ɪ/ in order to create the (presumably original) distinction. If he had a protolang where that distinction had been lost, he'd just have to edit a sound change file, and he'd probably have more time to do other things with it.

So yeah, the historical method is super useful. You can do all of these things just working synchronically, but it's a lot harder and more prone to inconsistency. The caveats are that you'll need to learn how to do historical work on top of synchronic typology, because you have to also create (at least some of) the protolanguage just on typological principles. You decide what time 0 is, but you can't just not have a time 0, and we don't know enough about what the very first languages were like to start at the beginning of time (at least for oral languages).

[sɤvjy:r i sunt͡se̞ svɑrilisæ kɤto̞ znix b̥ɤu̯ mo̞t͡sne̞jʃɑi̯ kɤde̞ priʃe̞d̥u pɑt͡snik vo̞d͡zɤnɑi̯ t͡se̞plɑi̯ pe̞le̞ri:ni | zgo̞d͡zilisæ ʒe̞ xto̞ jɑk pɤvɑi̯ prit͡ʃinɑi̯ pɑt͡snikˑɑ ɑb̥e̞ zd͡zɤu̯ svo̞u̯ pe̞le̞ri:nɑ b̥ɑd͡ze̞ wuznɑnɑi̯ zɑ mo̞t͡sne̞jʃi:g̥o̞ jɑk te̞n d̥rug̥ɑi̯ | po̞tˑe̞m sɤvjy:r zɑvjɤu̯ tɑk mo̞t͡sno̞ jɑk mo̞g̥u pɑk t͡ʃe̞g̥o̞ vjæt͡ʃɑi̯ vjɤu̯ te̞g̥o̞ b̥liʒe̞j prit͡sæg̥o̞vɑu̯ si pɑt͡snik svo̞u̯ pe̞le̞ri:nɑ ɑ ko̞ne̞t͡ʃno̞ sɤvjy:r po̞d̥:ɑu̯sæ | po̞tˑe̞m sunt͡se̞ t͡se̞plo̞ po̞svjɤt͡sy i pɑt͡snik no̞g̥de̞ zd͡zɤu̯ svo̞u̯ pe̞le̞ri:nɑ | ɑ tɑk sɤvjy:r pe̞d̥ɑu̯ priznɑ:t͡s ʒe̞ sunt͡se̞ b̥ɤu̯ mo̞t͡sne̞jʃi: znix d̥ɤvo̞u̯]

Surreal insect paintings by Nathiola on Reddit (Posted with permission!)

I gotta make myself be done with this