I believe elemental weapons need reconsideration

I am not a testing expert. Not because I couldn't, but because it is so difficult in this game to make and own multiple weapons. That is, however, related to the problem. The game makes it really difficult to own multiple weapons in terms of cost, time investment, and parts needed.  If you are going to play elemental, you are limiting one weapon to a small pool of monsters, so in this game with five elements, you need at least 5 elemental weapons. I believe I saw too that you need a raw for at least one or two monsters, so you're looking at a minimum of 6 weapons to play elemental. All well and good, except that is a monumental task, and limits greatly how many different weapons you might play. In MH Rise I have almost all of the hammers to their maximum upgrades in maybe 200 hours of play. In this game I have two 5* weapons in maybe 100 hours of play.

This game allows you to dismantle and rebuild weapons, for a cost (and I do love this weapon creation and dismantling system, by the way). In theory, if you have 12k or so gold, and all the monster parts, you could dismantle and rebuild  a weapon before each hunt, but that time consuming in its own way and cost ineffective. You really need a full suite of weapons to even consider playing elemental.

If elemental weapons are going to be that hard to acquire, they should be worth all of the investment. In their current state, they do not appear to be. This is where it would be a good idea if other testing was done by the community and some other examples could be added, but here is mine:

I built a 5* water nodachi. Useful really only vs Emberplume, primarily, going by in-game notes, but theoretically also useful against Lavabacks. I just wanted to test elemental on nodachi, so I built the easiest one for me to build. It is a crit nodachi, so I put Water Wilt +15% on it, Critical Master +10% and Critical Chain +12%, to stack with its Inherent Critical Chain 20%. This should in theory be a very swingy weapon in terms of damage, but that is fine - my main goal was to test the base elemental hit damage. Versus an Emberflume on a full charge hit to the head I got 736. No food. I did this again with a flat 5* raw nodachi that had Hawk Eye +15% on it and got 839. Less 15% from Hawk Eye is 713. So, the elemental nodachi vs a monster weak to its element did 23 more damage, as far as i can tell, and the Emberplume is weak to Water (4* weakness).

This seems wrong. There might be setups that improve this, but even a flat hit comparison like this should produce much more favorable results for elemental setups A factor of 5x more would be 115 damage difference on the biggest hit for the weapon. It seems elemental damage is off, at least for nodachi, by at least a factor of 2-3x and maybe more. Elements for nodachi do not seem to be worth the effort or even any good.

Maybe nodachi are just not a weapon that can use elements in this game. MH has a MV that makes faster weapons better for elemental application. I just wish that we could utilize more builds. A significant portion of the nodachi weapon tree and skills are useless if elementals are this bad for them. I hope the devs would consider looking at it as a possible thing in the game to buff, but I don't know the state of elementals in other weapons, and that of course is an important consideration.