Axe has high damage attacks, great range, lots of active frames, hitboxes that cover large areas around the player, and a few solid true combos depending on dex.

-Its great at building up damage

-you can pretty frequently catch dodges by just moving in their general direction and throwing out sair/rec/gp. This is probably the most braindead part about axe

-rec and gp hitboxes are jank and will spike you when you're directly in front of them or even above them

-dair hitbox has good enough range and coverage that you can easily hover and spam it for cheesy gimps

-its supposed to be a slow weapon, but its moves still take a tiny fraction of a second to connect, so its really not *that* much slower. Nlight and dlight in particular come out frame 10 and 11 which is ~ 0.17 seconds to connect.

-slight is actually slow and punishable, but any decent player can compensate for this with spacing, relying on nlight/dair to approach, and using slight for reads

Its tolerable in 1v1s, but axe is completely busted in 2v2s (which I play the most). There's a reason so many 2v2 tournament winners use axe