Hmm I wonder if the fact that they switched BACK to using boost after changing it to point for Skypiea means that they translated Water Seven BEFORE translating Skypiea. We really don't know how long they've been working on this. Perhaps they originally only planned the speed up volumes to be Skypiea.
Before the speed up was announced, I had a feeling they would speed up after Alabasta.
But I thought they would do 3 per month releasing all of Skypiea and jump back in with Water Seven - run Water Seven at 5 chapters per month for 2 years - then do a second speed up.
Basically in two parts like Naruto.
What we got was obviously much better.
However, it may not have been too far off. The fact that Boost is used in Water Seven but not in Skypiea makes little sense unless they translated Water Seven first. The only possible reason for this I can think of is that they planned to jump to Water Seven in the magazine initially - a partial speed up, but then decided to go with a full speed up later.