+1 speed to the slower weapons is a step in that direction. It doesn't go as far as I'd like, ideally I'd want +1 speed for 98 and below, +2 for 94 and below and +3 for 89 and below, from what we had(with a few exceptions here and there, obviously). Still, it helps make the more deadly weapons fun and viable again. There's some other stuff that we'd like to do along these lines, but they're harder to implement.
I don't think that's the good way to do things. Like, at all. Slow, high damage, long weapons are already very popular precisely because of their high damage and length, which combined can more than compensate for the illusory "slowness" of having low speed rating. Every weapon, every single melee weapon is
fast when you use it correctly. Or rather, abuse it correctly. And I'm sure you know this already. It's not even that hard to spam people with a long maul, that thing hits like a truck even before speed rating enters into play, because it has high blunt damage. It's the same thing with every powerful weapon, regardless of speed. Hitting first is only about being the first to make your weapon model collide the enemy, and the player is always in full control of that. If you learn to turn around to make your weapon collide exactly when it should, you will hit very hard, very fast, with any high damage weapon.
In my opinion, making those "broken" weapons (broken as in relying on engine weaknesses to be effective) even more broken by giving them more speed will just make them easier to use for people that don't really know how to use them and that's it. Perhaps more importantly, increasing their speed will make them easier to block with, actually decreasing the lethality of melee a little bit more.
Instead of this (I want to say bullshit), what about actually increasing the lethality of melee combat and increasing
damage.
It seems you want to make it easier to
hit people. But there's really no problem with that currently. Every player lowers their guard at some point. The problem is that with the average builds and armors these days, you have to hit enemies an absurd amount of times to kill them, even if they are literally the worst player ever. That's the real problem. If someone is bad enough to get hit 1, 2 or 3 times in melee, that should be enough to make them
die in most circumstances. So no, increasing speed ratings is not a step in the right direction, not at all.