By the time I got into D&D adaptations with NWN (3rd edition) weapons and their associated feats were already an overbuilt mess, and if anything proved that to me, it was going back to play Icewind Dale and finding the weaponry actually made more sense years prior.
Blame it partly on the usual one-upmanship. Every new goblin-pokin' stick gots ta be bigger an' stickier than the last to impress munchkins. Once you give them swords they want greatswords, and then grandswords and great-grandswords and megaswords and gigaswords. Once you give them double axes they want quadruple axes, and how many lightsaber blades are we Darth Mauling and Grievousing nowadays? If you haven't turned Jedis into lightsaber porcupines yet, you're obviously not trying hard enough. So let's make a few points:
1) Giving one class access to all weapons and weapon feats made a little sense when strictly delineating each class by one core function: hits shit, disarms traps, heals, nukes. But any more nuanced class system needs more gradations. See post #2 in this series for my case on doing away with the "fighter" class.
2) There's a difference between choice and redundancy. Characterizing my "dire mace" as a quarterstaff with better stats when replaying NWN's expansions a few years ago spoke to transparent redundancy in more than one dimension. In addition to power bloat you're needlessly duplicating functionality between different types of bladed weapons and so forth, which overwhelmingly invalidates weapon specialization feats for just one type of falchion/scimitar/gladiolus/whatever... and then they went and duplicated the whole mess yet again for weeaboo appeal with kamas and katanas. So let's hit that last point first. Claymores, Zweihanders, Daikatanas, unless you're specifically banking on historical accuracy to the level of Kingdom Come: Deliverance, such distinctions are cosmetic and should be treated as such. Trying to implement separate specializations in each of fifty different flavors of "yew call that a knoife" in a single campaign just invites itemization woes.
3) Homogenization is even worse. In Baldur's Gate 3 my only character who did not use a crossbow was the party's rogue, but despite abandoning most old class/race weapon proficiencies, many items still came with bonuses accessible or tailored to rogues, gith or whatever, demonstrating that complete freedom of choice wouldn't be very fun in a genre where you're expected to establish personal identity.
So where's that sweet spot between too much or too little choice? Well, the old precept of basic / martial / exotic weapons was solid, if only it hadn't been watered down. Much like the law / goodness intersection, the several axes of combative prowess (magic / range / defense / offense) go a long way toward establishing characters on a continuum in relation to each other. (A duelist for example: give it light armor with exotic weaponry; a cleric the reverse.) Problem: if completely synonymous with class choice, it's not an opportunity to roleplay. If cleric=mace and thief=dagger and wizard=staff then you may as well upgrade the weapon slot automatically as you level instead of pretending to let players distribute new cutlery among the party. Otherwise, MMOs demonstrate the logical extreme for endless, class-specific, linear gear upgrades: a mindless incremental grind for predetermined outcomes.
4) Weapons should be usable, even for spellcasters. Icewind Dale intrigued me not least by my casters outputting much of their damage not from limited-use fireballs but from their piddlin' little 1D4 slings. (Granted, that was largely because IWD featured a Diablo-esque quantity of trash mobs to clear, but still...) Keep Half-Life's crowbar in mind as object lesson: it wouldn't have become nearly as emblematic if you hadn't been encouraged to use it. Eliminate damage cantrips and the all-purpose magic missile. Institute spell reagents and ammunition (another good experience was rationing +l33t ammo in IWD2; black arrow, you were passed down from my father and his father, etc.) but don't fall into the trap of making everyone into a greatsword-swingin' battlemage as Larian or Bethesda do. Spellcasters should be limited to simple weapons, and also constantly falling back on those simplest of weapons for damage dealing, both to economize on precious mana or spells per day and because magic should not be a primary damage source to begin with.
Note much of this only really applies to party-based cRPGs or other squad management. An author or tabletop GM can tailor loot to his party's needs if he wants (see Roy, Belkar and Durkon from OOTS all getting ranged melee attacks so they're not standing around waiting for flight spells to expire) and single-character campaigns default to the player character snatching up the biggest baddest available pokin'-stick at every turn. It's when deliberately balancing a roster with frontliners, flankers and support that weapon differentiation feels most rewarding and the gamut must be best defined. Everything from whip-chains, tridents and Excalibur through simple but trusty off-the-rack spears, crossbows and shortswords all the way down to blacksmith's hammers, slings, blowguns and good old-fashioned tree branches should come with their own advantages and disadvantages, never pigeonholed to one class and never available to all.
More importantly they should play off each other: spears holding off enemies for archers to shoot, crossbows staggering enemy advance for slow-swinging halberds to wind up reach attacks, disorienting slung pebbles allowing daggers to crit, staff trip moves giving heavy warhammers an elevation damage bonus on prone targets, whatever ways you can think of weapons INTERACTING among a well-balanced party would greatly help legitimize what has in most cases boiled down to meaningless cosmetic fluff. When did roleplaying strategists forget the notion of combined arms? Blunt/slash/pierce is a nice start, but how often do you see campaigns putting to use even that basic distinction from fight to fight and zone to zone?
And if your weapons really don't work differently with different requirements and interactions, then stop claiming your game has fifty "different" flavors of sharp stick.
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P.S.:
Weirdly, you'll see single-character games like The Age of Decadence implementing basic yet impactful weapon properties (like spears blocking enemy advance) but that may have more to do with the low fantasy setting. It wasn't afraid special weapon moves would cut into the specialness of fireballs and blizzards. On the other hand, we do need to skew fantasy more toward the low end...
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