Simply put every onehanded weapon is a caster weapon as soon as you roll offensive 2 sockets on it. Sure it's bad to be forced into using a catalyst but without meaningfull weapon buffs like caster weapons dmg is added to spells (what they stole without compensation going from alpha to beta) magic skill users will always be shafted. Back in Alpha days of the game everything was at least balanced and everything was OP to work with and on the same insane dmg floor right now magic skill users have a terrible time because there are a lot of bugs and terrible dmg scaling that hold casters back.

Yes I want a 1 handed caster weapon and if it is a melee weapon I would be happy because it should be allowed for casters to use the darn dash attack as well and not to be left out of a game mechanic.

Yes, lots of stuff was working great in alpha, some even in beta then they rushed a terrible release for some reasons. I think they started to run out of money and they chose releasing it in this state over possibly not releasing at all. $400k from Kickstarter is not an awful lot, and based on the early access peak user count of 1.6k, I think there was like 10k users total, which is another $300k. Unless they invested lots of their own money or got an investor, they simply ran out of money after 4 years.

Wands would be cool. I'd love to see Wands as a main-hand Caster item.