Weapons are very, very important for some classes, primarily melee, and not as much for others, like some ranged, healers, and tanks. However, valor can only buy you armor and trinkets. What the current system ends up doing is making valor more valueable to ranged, healers, and tanks, but less valueable to melee, because the average DPS increase one gets from valor spent is smaller for melee classes.
Blizzard's answer to this is always "we don't want everyone to not have to raid to get loot". And the other answer they give is "I've never gone an entire tier without getting a weapon." Well, just because it doesn't happen often that no one gets their weapon, it does happen.
I understand not making weapons easy to purchase. So my idea would to be to put the price at 3000 valor, and lock it to the exalted level of reputation from whatever the primary rep is for that tier.
It's extremely frusterating when I as a melee class am falling behind in dps, despite having as much up-time and higher statistics in other areas than other people in my class, but still doing significantly less dps.
The only other option would be to make some weapons craftable.
Either craftable or valor weapons could be a lower ilvl, like 516 for the current tier. That would be a compromise I could deal with.
Thoughts?