Okay, so after playing around with this a bit, I've got a glitch for ya. When forcing weapons to behave like another type, they're still gaining WEXP for the new type on my end. I set Iron Sword to bow for the neutral WT effect, the weapon level increase showed the sword icon, but Lowen had an E Bow rank. Same thing when I applied magic typings to a test thunder sword, too.
The hand axes work like a charm, though! Just installed it into Elibian Nights with relative ease. After using the modules on a clean expanded ROM, it's basically just copy/pasting these values wherever you have free space
01 29 02 D0 01 37 01 2F 12 DD 44 46 FF 20 04 40 36 E0 28 88 FF 28 09 D8 A0 42 01 D0 10 35 F8 E7 28 79 01 28 02 D1 50 46 01 30 82 46 02 48 00 47 02 48 00 47 C0 99 C9 08 3D 29 05 08 DD 28 05 08 05 4C 24 18 24 78 01 2C 04 D1 06 99 00 29 01 D1 01 22 06 92 01 4C 20 47 00 01 00 09 BB 2D 05 08 05 4C 24 18 05 4C 24 18 04 D1 05 99 00 2E 01 D1 01 22 05 92 01 4C 20 47 00 01 00 09 4D 2D 05 08 28 2C 00 D0 29 2C D1 D0 00 4D C2 E7 C0 99 C9 08
And then at 0x52932, replace
01 29 02 D0 01 37 01 2F CF DD
with
01 48 00 47 01 37 ?? ?? ?? ??
Where the ??s are your pointer +1 (I wrote it at BE24B0, so mine was B1 24 BE 08). Seriously, this fixes one of the absolute stupidest things with the base engine. Before we had to redo all of the axe classes' animation lists to support a new throwing axe, and it borked some of the animations even. No longer an issue! Any axe with the hand axe animation assigned will work as intended.