ASM isn't very hard to learn, but if you want to do anything interesting with it, you need a good understanding of how the CPU works. Axe simplifies things a great deal by providing a ton of convenience functions for the most common tasks. Makes things much easier than building from scratch in ASM.
Also, assembly isn't necessarily faster than Axe, but if you are really good at it, then you'll be able to write smaller and more optimized programs, and it's quite fun.