what nuance do you need for chopsticks? chopsticks are for eating. they shouldn't be on a weapons chart. if they want people to recreate a very specific trope from wuxia films they can make a separate rule specifically for monks.
Past tense,
they wanted in 1985 to... I'm not being pedantic here. When you say 'they want' and 'they can' your talking about the present. In the present I agree completely. For this though we need to step into our Delorean...
First, and more problematically, it is common trope in Asian martial arts cinema generally. I don't think it had much to do with any real-world comps. Chopsticks got used in fight scenes all the time in the movies and so the authors wanted to make sure that was possible mechanically. Putting them on the weapon list, in the context of 1st edition, was necessary to make them even remotely usable as weapons. That's the problematic reading but accounting for 1E mechanics. It still looks poor.
Second, it's the OA equivalent of the knife. The knife is on the 1st Ed weapon list separate from and inferior to the dagger. Its not there as a legit weapon choice, it's there so if a fight breaks out at the tavern you know how much damage your utensil does. They do identical damage to chopsticks btw. This is a far less problematic reading, IMO anyway.
The second bit above is a entirely legitimate reading of 1st edition rules. I'm not suggesting that it's the whole story mind, but I do think that its an example of how the 'chopsticks issue' suffers from a overly superficial treatment. So when I say nuance, I mean that completely seriously (and not as a dodge, or distractor). The issue about comeliness suffers from a similar lack of understanding of the 1st edition rules.
I wouldn't put chopsticks on a weapons chart now at all. One, they're covered just fine by the 5E improvised weapons rules, and two, navigating the issues with representation and trope use just make it a poor idea all around to single them out.