Mages and weapon speed

Just wondering but was there a reason why nexon implemented weapon speeds into wands/staves during
the first few years of maplestory?

I've read that only f/p's explosion was affected back then so it seems odd that they took the time to separate
each wand/staff into slow, normal, or fast categories...

Well, for one thing, all weapons need an assigned speed for normal attacks. And it could have been a placeholder in case they ever changed the way mage attacks worked in future updates or for new classes as we've seen.

Most weapons that makes this question relevant comes from JMS and their crazy fiddeling. Otherwise it is just low level stuff that break the normal wand and slow staff norm.