Lagombi basically wins by default. Elemental phials are just way better for late game elemental builds so power phials don't really compete and switch axe is pretty limited in ice options so it's one of literally only two ice elemental phials. The only other option is Barioth which a high affinity weapon that's giving too much in its other stats for that affinity so it doesn't compete

Switch axe generally wants to be slotting in crit boost 5 and power prolonger 3 anyway, which only leaves the room to squeeze in 1 handicraft if you can find the power prolonger/handicraft deco. Switch axe is definitely capable of chewing through its sharpness bar pretty quickly so yeah I'd agree that honestly 2 sharpness is kind of preferable if you're not trying to be hyper optimal. 1 is technically enough but you are probably gonna hit blue while still fighting with only 1 sharpness at times if you're not getting like speedrun times so 2's just a lot comfier and easier to use

Honestly my take, they should have made it so zero sum discharge could link into the unbridled/full release slash using the slinger instead of (or maybe in addition to) the grounded elemental discharge getting that follow up that I don't think I've ever actually used. An actual opening for ZSD into full release slash would probably be pretty rare but it would give you the way out of the recoil while still keeping some cost asscoiated since you're going into a second move that also spends a lot of sword gauge

All elements are covered but its close. There's only 2 thunder monsters which means it could have been very possible to end up with a weapon missing a thunder weapon entirely and plenty only get one. Water and ice are only 3 each so some stuff only gets one there as well. Not all statuses are covered though, there's only one sleep tree so anything without a Nerscylla weapon has no non artian option which is a fair few. And while there are two blast monster trees there are actually some weapons that dodge them both and have no non artian blast weapon. I play switch axe for example which has no sleep, no blast and only one option for both thunder and ice outside of artian (and both of them happen to be pretty bad weapons)

Honestly it does feel a little light specifically in terms of non large monster trees.

The large monsters yeah they're pretty good. Returning monsters brought back mostly all of their existing weapon designs and all new ones have pretty average expected amounts of weapons with no slap on designs. I know some people are a bit disappointing about the apexes not being in getting all 14 weapons camp that special monsters like flagships and final bosses get which is understandable but otherwise its pretty solid there.

But outside of that things are sparse, like you've got the exepected default (hope), bone and ore trees for everything (and I guess you could also include artian in that list) but from there. Off the top of my head 3 weapons get a generic paralysis tree (the jail hammer and a greatsword and gunlance that are basically just recolored hope weapons). Hunting horn has the vespoid tree, dual blades has a generic water tree, lance gets the castle lance and greatsword gets the jawblade and the frozen speartuna. I might be forgetting one or two in there but I think that's literally it. Like I don't think World had a ton either but this feels conspicuously low. Especially with stuff like the vespoid and paralysis tree covering all 4 of the melee weapons that lacked a weapon from Lala Barina, the only paralysis monster. You'd think given that they'd do similar for stuff like sleep and blast which have only one and two monsters respectively so do have weapons that have no tree for that status but no. Feels like they either just ran out of time and stopped or just decided eh artian can cover the gaps this time at some point

There's 5 monsters that can be frenzied and the full list is just the 5 monsters found in the iceshard cliffs minus Jin Dahaad (and I guess technically Gore itself). It feels more like frenzied monsters are an ecological nod than like a major mechanic this time so makes sense they're limited to just those found in Gore's immediate vicinity

I mean there's a few things I'd say. For one while its a different team and the master rank expansion Sunbreak's are the freshest title updates in peoples minds which consistently did add multiple monsters despite Sunbreak being a pretty complete package at base.

I think the more relevant to the discussions in this subreddit particularly though is that fact that the first title update was leaked as Mizu and Zinogre all that time back. Plans can change and in fact it seems pretty certain a lot of plans did change with Wilds but the fact is here a lot of people did spend months running on the assumption TU 1 was gonna be two new monsters from a source that seemed to have been pretty reasonably proven to be credible

The final thing is just the initial announcement itself. The way it was worded did seem to initially imply there may be a 3rd thing on top of Mizu and an arch tempered monster so given the leak knowledge of Zinogre was well as some of the seemingly pushed back from base stuff like Seregios, Lagiacrus and Zoh Shia and the announcement of another thing people have taken as being pushed back from base of the gathering hub. I think its pretty understandable how expectations got raised.

Yeah Narga was popular since it was high affinity and good natural white sharpness (which was pretty hard to come by) so it was very a very comfy/easy option. I think other axes did have it beat on raw I wanna say it was Tigrex I ran before switching to element.

Barioth was pretty similar to Narga though funnily enough I just remember it as the unfortunate outclassed weapon. Narga was generally the more popular of the two for raw. Once they added elders Kushala beat it out for ice builds even with a power phial. Then come Sunbreak elemental phial stocks rose but everything being upgraded to the final tier means Lagombi of all things outclassed it since Barioth was giving up too much ice for its good affinity

Element was technically optimal for switch axe in Rise if I recall, though it was by a much smaller margin than in Sunbreak so a lot of people just ran raw since it was easier. And elemental builds did generally use elemental phial axes, though some of that is just high element weapons were more likely to be given elemental phials

Handicraft is +10 per level so one sharpness boost is 3 handicraft not 5, still is the equivalent of slotting slotting in a handicraft 3 jewel so yeah 2 sharpness boost is still plenty

I've been running a double sharpness roll switch axe and its honestly fine. Switch axe already tends to go with power prolonger over a sharpness skill but I definitely find just the one sharpness roll with no sharpness management kind tough though some people are running it. But two is plenty comfy

Correct me if I'm wrong here but last I recall there's no specific evidence of either Arch Tempered Gore or Shagaru being in any updates.

As far as I remember it was only the 4 apexes and Arkveld that had the legendary king flag that is being presumed to be arch tempered, Gore did not actually have it. Gore is in the same tier as that group and did have a HR gated legendary quest unlock like them that didn't actually end up being a thing in the full release so its possible those HR gates could be the HR requirements for the arch tempered versions but that's just a guess, could also be that at some point the tier 3 tempered monsters were going be post HR main story unlocks but they changed their mind. An arch tempered Gore is possible but its not a guarantee (I mean nothing that comes from datamined stuff is ever a guarantee until its announced but Gore is less of a guarantee than the other tier 3 monsters at least)
Shagaru meanwhile there's no specific evidence for being in the TUs beyond maybe the Chinese leakers no comment is hinting at it. Shagaru as TU is mostly a speculative, well it would make sense seeing as Gore is here thing but we don't actually know.

Also the wording in the first announcements of TU1 was "a monster of formidable strength at a level above Tempered!" which does indeed make it sound like just the one

It should still could towards your titles, hunt means either capture or kill. Kill specifically is slay, So those stats aren't saying you've killed hunted 27 Akrvleds and the 12 captures didn't count but that you've captured 12 and only killed 3 adding up to 15 for that 2nd title

Yeah if you're willing to drop either power prolonger or two levels of crit boost Lala Barina is a pretty nice choice, pretty solid budget versions of an artian para axe. Gore Magala is also a pretty reasonable choice in that case too

Switch Axe in Wilds generally wants to build raw damage and that being the case a power phial is just the best option since its the only phial type that's significantly adding to your damage. Power phials do still charge slower but its still more than worth it, especially if you slot in power prolonger which doubles the time you stay in amped state at level 3

As for axes the best power phial is pretty handily a status artian switch axe. As long as you get at least one +sharpness augment and don't roll too many plus element augments an artian weapon is probably gonna outclass any craftable axe in terms of base stats and gets the very nice 3 level 3 to work with. You have to build a status weapon to get a power phial on the artian axes but there's also no real downside to adding a status to your raw focused build, paralysis is generally considered the best one since para procs are just easy openings for full release slash but anything will do.

If you don't wanna mess with the artian stuff though your best options are probably Xu Wu and Rathalos' axes. Nu Udra is not that great, you only get an extra 10-20 raw over its competition but at the cost of -15% affinity. While getting up close to 100% affinity from armour skills is doable in Wilds getting the extra 15% to offset Nu Udra's negative is actually kind tough so its actually a relevant downside. But also its built in skill of rapid morph is not what it used to be in Rise so is not actually that desirable. Even with rapid morph looping morph attacks is just not very good for damage like it was in Rise so its more of niche utility/comfort skill.
Xu Wu and Rathalos both are power phials with decent white sharpness that come with a skill you wanna slot in anyway (power prolonger and crit boost respectively). Xu Wu's got 10 more raw and more hits of white sharpness than Rathalos but Rathalos has 10% affinity and 70 element over Xu Wu

The opening cutscenes state that the forbidden lands has been off limits and believed to be uninhabited for more than a thousand years. While I don't think its ever explicitly said I also got the impression that this is the first actual expedition into the Forbidden Lands since it was made a restricted area all the way back then. Fabius and Alma discovered Nata surveying the border lands between the Forbidden Lands as the rest of the world and there's not necessarily anything that indicates guild surveys had gone deeper than that until the discovery of Nata prompted them to conduct a proper investigation, at least nothing I remember

I mean I don't think its even a wrong way of thinking about it but to me if you asked me to list the monster hunter final bosses my first thought for who to list after Gaismagorm would be Zoh Shia and not Arkveld but like I I'd definitely understand where someone was coming from if they gave the answer of Arkveld, that's what I mean by semantics both can reasonably fit depending on how you personally view it.

The thrust of Wilds story is the search for the keepers village and investigating Arkveld's rampage and Zoh Shia is the giant monster revealed at the 11th hour as the true cause behind all the events we've been investigating, the decision to hunt it is given more weight and gravitas than any other monster in the game and afterwards the credits roll, Fabius gives his report that sounds like the final cutscene of any other game that wraps up the whole story in a tight little bow save for one little post credits stinger.

The game continues in high rank and there is still plot sure but that plot basically starts with, just hang around and make sure everything is okay in the aftermath of that finale. The first half of HR has cutscenes that are basically just there to be introductions to new systems like new returning monsters, tempered and the arena with barely any real connective plot to speak of. And overarching story does eventually come up in high rank but its far shorter and lighter than the LR story so to me ended up feeling much more like an epilogue than a conclusion.

The devs pre release did talk about the fact that a significant portion of players never finished World, and I'm sure the data would bear out the end of low rank was a very common stopping point, even if the story hasn't wrapped up yet suddenly you're back to fighting low level monsters you've already fought before and Zorah could kind of be mistaken for a climax, makes sense a lot of people would stop there. They talked about addressing that with things like the difficulty curve but I think there may have also been a bit of change in structure made for that too. Making the end of low rank the actual big story climax so that the players who do take that as their stopping point aren't missing out as much. But also doing things like opening up the game structure and leading not with HR versions of previous monsters but returning monsters who are new to HR. For an enfranchised player the open structure and returning familair faces are an exciting moment to pull them in but for the newer player Kut Ku is new to them so that plus the more obviously different structure between LR and HR help to pull them forward into not stopping there. And then even though its more of a postgame or epilogue there's a bit more in the way of cutscenes and even a light plotline to keep players moving.

I mean its kind of a semantics thing. Arkveld is the final hunt of HR but I'd also argue Zoh Shia is absolutely the "final boss", it ticks literally all the boxes in terms of design fight and even plot role of a typical final boss the only thing that's different is position being at the end of LR not HR. But they roll the credits at the end of LR and don't do it again after Arkveld, HR feels more to me like an epilogue than anything else, akin to like the postgame of an MR game more than previous games HR. It's even structured more like gen 5 postgames with the uncap into occasional rank gates you need to do specific quests to uncap (though definitely with more plot than what the usual gen 5 postgames got)

Honestly I feel like the problem's not even in the monster list itself, its severe lack of non monster weapon trees. Look at paralysis where they actually did, Lala Barina is the only para monster but for the 4 melee weapons that didn't get a Lala Barina weapon 3 of them got a generic paralysis tree and hunting horn got the vespoid tree feels like they were conciously aware of making sure every weapon got an option. But then that's the only place they did that, sleep's also got only one tree with Nersyclla and blast only two with Ajarakan and Gravios but miss out of those and oops its only artian. And that's not mentioning the generic elemental trees, World and Rise for example both had a generic thunder tree for the swaxe which given its lack of thunder seems like a no brainer to have brought back. But outside of the para tree and a handful of weapon specific ones like the castle lance or frozen speartuna greatsword it seems like a lot of weapons only have the usual default hope tree, ore and bone for generic options.

I dunno if artian weapons were intended to be a one size fits all solution to that problem (I'd think so if not for the para trees) or they just ran out of time or something but it feels like the weapons trees would be filled out a lot with just a smattering more of them thoughout

To answer some of your questions about damage calculating. Element complicated to nomalize to raw damage due to the nature of how it works which is probably why you were having trouble finding it. In practice though generally speaking when you're building for raw damage rather than leaning into elemental damage and switching weapons to match the monsters weaknesses you can kind of just ignore element in your damage calculations if you want to keep things simple, it will be adding something but a fairly negligible depending on your weapon and sometimes actually nothing since most monsters will just take very little or even no damage at all from some elements.

Affinity is a bit simpler to calculate though, affinity is crit chance and crits baseline do 25% more damage. So while its not perfect you can simplify that to say 100% affinity would be worth a 25% damage boost so each point of affinity can be treated as 0.25% damage boost (with negative affinity you can also "anti crit" for 25% less damage so even if you're ignoring affinity you can still treat negative affinity as a damage drop). Like I said its not perfect, most raw builds are running the skill crit boost which makes crits 40% more damage at max so changes that evaluation to 0.4% per point but also that only counts up to 100% any further affinity at that point is worth nothing but it also means you can theoretically offset negative affinity to building up enough to still reach 100, but that probably has a hard to calculate cost of spending more skills on affinity versus other things.

A final thing you may be overlooking being newer though is the importance of sharpness. On top of other things sharpness gives a raw damage multiplier, and often high base raw weapons are worse off than they look since they're often paying for it by only having blue sharpness. The multiplier in Wilds for blue sharpness is I believe 1.2 versus white's 1.33 so its actually a pretty big deal.

So putting this all together with the weapons you listed, based on some googling I'm guessing 825 raw, -15% affinity is the guardian doshaguma longsword which is only blue sharpness. Unbloated 825 longsword raw is 250 raw while unbloated 693 on the artian is 210. If we ignore crit boost we can roughly treat the 10% affinity on the artian weapon as a 2.5% boost and the -15% on G Dosh as a 3.75% penalty and also multiply by the sharpness modifiers the artian weapon comes out at 286.2825 effective raw and the G Doshaguma is coming to 288.75. So its still ahead but only barely, and that's without any further optimisations like crit boost and stuff.

To answer the overall question there are a few reasons. When it comes to elemental builds the artian stuff usually is just unconstented best in slot for a lot of elements on a lot of weapons, the elemental values on a lot of weapons aren't that great so artian just competes well pretty directly and those 3 slots are valuable.
For raw its often a bit closer but it also comes out generally just in their favour from the stats plus slots with the artians. And on top of that you can effectively get a bonus stats like paralysis or something tacked on at no real cost with the artian weapons while with monster weapons they are often "paying" some raw or sharpness for their status compared to raw monster weapons. So in practice unless there's a weapon specific mechanic the artians don't do well on like the gunlances not having high enough shelling power or the hunting horns having a poor song list they just generally tend to come out ahead with a good roll

For switch axe probably Rathalos though Xu Wu also seems like a fine enough pick. Switch axe really wants crit boost 5 power prolonger 3 as its weapon skills and to get that on a non artian weapon you need one of those skills built in. Rathalos and Xu Wu both fit that bill while also having white sharpness and a power phial which is generally what you want. I've generally seen people say Rathalos is the pick, compared to Xu Wu its got 10% affinity and 70 (or well really just 7) more element in exchange for Xu Wu's 10 higher raw and better natural sharpness (though if you're lucky enough to have a power prolonger/handicraft deco Rathalos does get to close that gap by 10 points) but you can probably pick which of the two you like more and be pretty similar either way. If you're willing to settle for just crit boost 3 you open up the field to taking what you like regardless of its built in skills but honestly even then there's not a lot of standout candidates that opens, main one that comes up then is probably Lala Barina letting enjoy the paralysis for a free full release slash or two like the artian axe gets.

Technically greatsword doesn't have a La Barina weapon, it has a generic paralysis tree instead, which is made with Lala Barina parts but still technically isn't a Lala weapon so it doesn't end up following the shared skillset of them

Raw (3 non matching parts) always gives dragon phial. Element (2 or 3 matching the same element) always gives elemental phial and status (2 or 3 of a matching status) always gives a power phial. In practice you may as well always match all 3 since matching only 2 statuses for a power phial and having a 3rd random piece is just having slightly less of that incidental status for no benefit

They didn't forget to give stuff like evade extender or evade window 3 slots decos, they're just armour skills. Only weapon skills get the multiple levels within a single deco. Armour skills all work like base World or Rise where all the decos are a single point and the level just determines what size slot you need for that single point. Weapon skills getting multi point decos was probably just a change made to solve the problem the weapon/armour skill split introduces of the fact you have way more slots across 5 pieces of armour (and also the talisman which they made armour skills only) then you do in just a single weapon. Allowing the weapons to fit more skills in just the 3 slots they get max evens the playing field a lot more

Power prolonger was never bad in gen 5, it was just kinda hard to quantify its value in pure damage number terms and was sort of around the borderline of skills you could go either way of cutting or including depending on your taste..

I'd imagine the big reason its up in the essential tier now though is just that switch axes best damage is is spamming full release slash. 45 more seconds of full release slash being available per charge is actually pretty solid, especially in the context of these pretty quick speedrun times