[quote=@BrokenPromise]
[@whizzball1] It was not necessary, but she would have fallen in with every other "let's roll a bunch of random crap together and see what we get" magical girls. The point was that I actually got to keep my original idea, which was a character that could stun on sight and fight with their hair. The limitation only made those aspects more interesting and make sense. Well, as far as magical girls go.

Another character for something entirely different was only allowed to have 1 element. So even though I wanted to make a character that could control temperature {heat and freeze things} I decided to stick with fire. I couldn't freeze the ground and skate on it, but I could turn it molten and slide on the liquid magma. etc. That character was one of the only ones that was able to use fire as a utility, versus everyone else who used fire as a purely offensive power.
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That's why I don't contend with limitations that are made for the sake of consistency. But both of those sets of ideas came at the cost of others. It seems to me from your examples and others that a limitation [i]always[/i] comes at the cost of a net loss of potential ideas, but also that limitations encourage variation of ideas.

Out of curiosity, can you say with certainty that the ideas you used in place of your old ones were more interesting? If you never got to use your old ones, can you really say that you would have been less entertained with the ideas you didn't get to use? What combinations could you have made if you had access to both melting and freezing? I acknowledge that that's a lot of what ifs and hypotheticals.

At the very least, you were entertained by your idea in the context of that roleplay's setting, but you lost the chance of another. Considering that you would have been entertained either way, the limitations were basically positive—but I wouldn't say that the idea you were forced to use was definitely more interesting than the idea you wanted to use in the first place.
EDIT: This is more of a rhetorical question: if you had been given a free choice between, say, your two magical girls, and you hadn't yet tried either, which would you have chosen? I'll go as far as to say you would have chosen the idea where you had all the backstory you wanted and the relationship between Medusa and the magical girl. You were entertained either way, but not necessarily more interested.