In my experience, you are still gonna end up with a lot of child BPs using data tables or not but that does not mean data tables are useless, the main advantage data tables you will still have whether you have tons of BPs or not, that is editing all the stats will be done in one place and you won’t need to open up blueprints to set damage values etc. Not to mention it makes designers happy.
This really helps in large projects but for smaller projects it okay to forgo data-tables.
as for inheritance it also depends on you, if you have a crystal clear design in your mind about how many weapons will your game have and how each weapon would fit into the category then its okay to go with deriving classes, if not I would suggest try components first, you can easily make a component that manages hitboxes for swords, and have everything controlled via interfaces.
as for your last idea about storing reload animations in a data table and having an ability reference it, I personally haven’t tried it but I see no reason it would not work, as it is almost same as getting the reload animation from character’s weapon.