First off I agree that there is little sense to the weapons table. But in my opinion there has never been much sense in the D&D combat system. It has never had the granularity to do a decent job of differentiating weapons. The original designers did not sit down and think about how hand to hand fighting could be simulated they took an existing wargame mechanic and adapted it to man to man combat system and the rest was bolted on as it came up.I would get rid of simple/martial split in addition.
The weapons table is all over the place, with so sense what so ever.
shortbow is simple and longbow is martial? why? it's the same weapon with different weight pull.
same goes for all crossbows, why is light simple and heavy martial? point of all crossbows is to be simple to aim.
Same goes for firearms, they phased out bows as you could teach a village idiot how to use a musket in an hour.
handaxe simple, battleaxe martial? it's a damn axe.
same goes for light hammer and warhammer, some would even say that light hammer is more difficult as you need to learn to throw it at range, not just bash someone over head. Same as handaxe.
sickle is simple with it's disadvantage shape for combat and morning star that requires no edge alignment is martial? haha.
also, finesse has same value as versatile? what a joke.
where is the longspear, simple twohanded weapon, after a rock and stone dagger, one of the 1st known weapons to humanity?
To be honest I think it was a big mistake for WoTC to adopt the 6 second round the old one minute round made more sense for the level of abstraction D&D works at.