I have been radicalized against weapon ranks

It's crazy how time can just change your views on grinding. As a teen, weapon rank didn't matter to me too much. As an adult, i kinda hate it. But specifically, the ones that you have to grind.

It's been more than a decade since i played any pre-SoV Fire Emblem so i decided to revisit, to refresh my opinions. It's been going well so far but one thing i really do not like now is weapon rank grinding. I can't really see the benefit. "Oh it stops you from using powerful weapons early on", cool, as if those types of weapons are available early anyways. However, i find that it generally just kneecaps characters and classes.

Let's take Donnel from Awakening. Donnel starts out as a Villager with E-rank in Lances. Ok cool. What's his promotion options looking like (not that he technically has one). Mercenary and Fighter. Cool. None of them use lances. So now he's stuck in E-rank hell for twice as long.

That's arguably the most extreme example but even characters who do carry over the weapon rank don't get to make use of any new ones without extensive grinding. In my experience at least, most of the time, a unit who gets a secondary or even tertiary weapon type upon promotion will not use them because it's too much of a hassle to grind it up to the primary weapon that already has good rank.

Then you have game-specific issues like Binding Blade, where if you want a light mage, either grind up Elen or Saul to Lv.10, promote, and suffer through e-rank hell or use Yodel who comes in kinda late (on that note, i'm glad that the defenseless cleric trope has been done away with). Thracia 776, where characters just magically forget how to use anything other than a sword when dismounting. The admittedly developer goof in Shadow Dragon where Hardin can't use the Silver Sword intended for him because of the changes to weapon rank.

Speaking of, i do like weapon rank grinding if they do the FE1-3 thing where it's just one universal level. This will never come back though but Engage did bring back fixed weapon rank like in FE4 so they should just keep doing that if you ask me personally. Fates' mixture of the systems is really strange and bad but it is admittedly offset by forged iron weapons > everything else. And Three Houses' weapon rank system worked for that game and that game only.

Tl;dr i understand that as an RPG, a level of grinding is involved but that doesn't mean everything has to be a grind.