I'm definitely no expert on balance or anything, but I feel as if weapon stats were handled a bit better in the older games.

Silver weapons in Fates give a large drawback in -2 STR with no real reason to use them above your +7 forged iron weapon (but that's a whole other story.) This made silver weapons either niche or unusable, and the might of the weapons wasn't worth the drawback.

Silver weapons in older games had less durability and hit but had a high damage output- this, along with weight, meant that silver weapons were reserved for high-skill, high-con units. The types of units fitting that criteria were normally high-level promoted units with a good enough weapon rank to use high-tier weapons.

This made silver weapons a difficult to use weapon for low-level, normally unpromoted units with a high price tag, weakish durability, and below-average availability.

In my past runs of the GBA titles I used silver weapons along with iron and steel, and all weapon types had their own reason to be used, whether it be durability, weight or might. With the removal of durability and weight, however, the balance is a bit whack.

To sum it all up, silver weapons were strong mightwise but suffered from various other drawbacks that made them balanced, but not useless. Also, sorry for the long write-up for such a simple thing- I really wanted to be as thorough as possible!