Yes, I agree that it's more faithful to English formal structure to preserve it, but the fact that it's functioning as a conjunction isn't the best reason.
Take a look at this:
I like playing football and basketball.
And is connecting a complete sentence to an implied one.
It's an acceptable structure, but from a semantic perspective, and as I've already mentioned, the sentence suffers from ambiguity:
1. I like playing football andI like playing basketball.
2. I like playing football and I like basketball[but I don't like playing basketball].
But the following one is overtly wrong without any further thinking, because it compares two heterogeneous entities:
-The paintings in this gallery are similar to that gallery.
So it's a matter of syntax and semantics. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't, depending on the sentence.
Now, apart from grammar and things of that sort, I'm willing to know if you're interested in morphology and etymology. Indian was a very influential language in the formation of many words and concepts. We can talk about such issues from time to time. What do you think?
Good luck,