Athican longswords don't appear until you research them (mid-game), vs. one-handed spears which are immediately available.  So if you're looking for something specifically at start, you necessarily must choose the spears (which as a side bonus gives you immediately available better-than-wooden shields.)

That said, If you're looking for a reason to pick either Defensive trait (which gives the 1H spears/bronze shields) or Wanderlust (which gives Athican Armor, the 2 slightly better swords, and quest maps) - you probably want to consider more than Wanderlust's weapons.  Personally, I find that the armor and quest maps are the more valuable benefits.

Looking a bit further still, though, if you're just worried about your heroes/sovereign (as the comment above about Defender class might imply) then it likely won't make much of a difference as you'll probably want to use some loot discovered while questing vs. whatever you can buy from your shops.

One handed spears are just op. And they are available thoughout the game.

RE: the map pack - while it does come with some custom designed maps, what many people value it for more are the increased number of stamps, which increase the variety of randomly generated maps too.  So win-win

AFAIK there are no 3rd party random map generator utils or 3rd party created custom maps available.

As far as mods that affect random maps, the only thing that comes to mind is sjaminai's:

https://forums.elementalgame.com/446059/page/1/

...which basically tweaks the generation options to make things less like "Pangaea" and more like current Earth continents, as well as adding a new map size (Gigantic) even larger than the largest default option. If you run Gigantic, though, you might have to limit which mods you use for memory constraints, depending on your machine.

I suppose you could also include things like the Tile Mod:

https://forums.elementalgame.com/444847/page/1/

...but that changes a lot more than just maps, per se.  It hasn't been updated in quite a while, though, so you might need to do some work to bring it into line with 1.5.

I am using the pathwork mod and I'm still able to play on Huge Maps. It actually got updated to have better AI for those big maps as well.

One neat thing about Warriors with Wanderlust swords is that you can easily have three counter-attacks by mid-game (2 from the Fending Blade, 1 from Warrior trait.)  As a Warrior you will have a high Attack, so ignoring Armor is often not needed, but being able to smack up to four units a turn is almost always nice.  Combine with Air Magic so you can teleport into the middle of their pack and you will scythe through melee-heavy enemies such as rock spiders, skaths, umberdroth, and city garrisons.