Weapon Overhaul Idea help

Questions
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So I’ve been thinking about creating a hack (big surprise huh), and one of he first things I thought was how to spice things up mechanically. I’ve always enjoyed FE games a lot, but I was never really good at it, and I haven’t played the GBA titles as much as most people here so I wanted to hear your opinions on how a weapon overhaul would/wouldn’t work.

The first idea is to transform both the weapon and magic triangles into “rectangles”. It would be something like this:

Sword → Axe → Lance → Bow → Sword
Water → Earth → Fire → Wind → Water

Both spells and staffs would be redistributed into the new 4 magic types, with Water and Wind having most staffs and some damaging spells (I’ve never enjoyed full healers a lot). Also a lot of the Dark magic effects would be transferred to Earth and have lower range, while Fire would have most of the Light spell effects. The anima weapon effects would be evenly distributed between the four.

I also wanted to play around with ranges, so I thought to make lances have 2 range as default (with some staying at 1 range, like the effective ones), have more than 1 longbow option and return 2 ranged daggers in the sword category. For the magic types, Wind would have the longest range with a few 2-3, earth would be the opposite with most being 1 range and some 1-2. Water and fire would stay the same at 1-2 range normally. Now, I know this will require heavy changes in weapon stats for everything to balance out (hence the overhaul), but I guess what I want to know the most is:

1- Does a heavy change like this even interest you?
2- Is this going too far from the default FE experience?
3- Dou you think this could actually work if balanced properly?
4- What would these changes entail?
5- Am I crazy?

I haven’t tested anything out yet, I first wanted to hear other peoples opinions, see if this is even worth pursuing. What do you think of these changes (rectangles, ranges)? Would at least one of them work/be interesting?
There’s a lot more I wanted to say, but in the true spirit of FE hacking, I tried to be as concise as possible.

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  1. As long as it has thought put into it and ends up being fun, I don’t think any idea should immediately be discarded. (See #2)
  2. In my opinion, no. There is a very large space of things that could qualify as “Fire Emblem” that are way different than what is a typical official FE. Story, mechanics, etc.- it all really doesn’t matter as long as it has the spirit and heart of what makes Fire Emblem what it is. They could make the next FE be Valkyria Chronicles-esque (no “grid” but a distance-based movement system in a fully 3D map) or could do away with the concept of classes for player units, etc., but as long as it still had the typical core (pre-chapter dialogue, map with unit v unit combat and a focus on sword and sorcery for weapons, post-chapter dialogue, meaningful character interactions, etc.), I would still consider that being enough like Fire Emblem to be a Fire Emblem. Often times, I think people are a little too rigid in their view and want only the exact same thing that they’ve already played again when it comes to new titles - you gotta freshen things up to make sure they don’t become stale.
  3. Potentially. Range modifications have been fiddled with in projects already, so it’s doable. I don’t particularly think that bows being a single component of the physical rectangle really makes sense (why are they only good against swords?), but if you can get it to work, game balance and mechanics can outweigh logic, I guess.
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