I don't mean to start a debate, but this in no way improves loot, in fact loot gold (when selling loot to merchants) is severely reduced from vanilla VC. Cheaper weapons? No I'd say realistic weapons, this is in no way fantastical, if an axe costed 1400 penningas or so no one would have bought them,
Debate? realistically speaking you should try to understand the cost structure of 800s for many things to even start the debate. First off, money is arbitrary in here, everything is always normalized to more tangible goods. Anyways, swords should really be ~8-10k, mail should be in 10-15k range and helmets in a few thousands. These things were all made on order, it's 800s and not mid 16 century with armorers producing goods for sale.
Second, sword was and is a dominant weapon. Do you think Romans had no clue about axes and used their short sword instead because they were dumb? Sword is significantly harder to make (like realllllly much harder) as opposed to making a cheap axehead. If you want, I can give you a short lecture on metallurgy, especially the one in mid 800s. Swords mostly came from Frankia so they couldn't be "cheap".
Now regarding the axe - axe is a cheap weapon, but it's unsuitable for defense, unbalanced and thus slower, short, and will only inflict damage if you hit with its right spot. In other words, most hits with an axe will be glancing blows without real damage. Saying axe was Ak47 is probably correct, cheap and not very accurate.
Bows, I guess these things have to come up continuously. Ok, bows were not real bows of 1200s. They were mainly hunting bows, and people using them were not warriors, they were peasants. Bow was a weapon of choice of a lowest viking because he could not afford anything else. British and Saxons didn't use longbows in 800s, longbow was most likely reintroduced to England by Vikings, but was not most likely used in England en masse until some time in 11 century (about 200 years after the fact). So in essence to simulate a lack of archer warfare in England, we have 2 choices, make bow strong but wipe out any archer units that are in the game (they are all fantasy units anyways), or make bows and archers weak and let only player progress. Basically, if you get to skill 300 in archery you pretty much can kill anyone with 1-3 arrows. So buffing the bow without making adjustments to units and their quantity makes battles unbalanced. Noone won battles with archers, they were always a disturbance unit.
Missile-javelins, OK, most thrown weapons can be easily sidestepped. One hit one kill is bogus because there is no angling possibilities in WB, pretty much any hit goes straight through. Again, you need to balance that against the damage these javelins cause.
Finally, chainmail. Believe it or not, anyone in a chainmail was semigod, that's why people wore it (not to mentioned the stuff they wore under it).
The only thing I would change back is the piercing damage for the seaxes, it had to be reduced otherwise bots favored them over spears (internal WB engine logic). Don't know why you think spears are useless, one hit and you could be half dead even in chainmail.
Making weapons cheap makes you a semigod early on, even at level 1. I guess you like playing in a fantasy world.
Lastly, I noticed you removed "your wife cheating on you". That really looks like extremely sensitive area for you
because in the game world it's pretty much meaningless.