@Mingo22:
Why does everyone forget that Robin is with the revolutionaries. A big large bad ass army of xxxxx number of people. RAN By Luffy's Father!
You think that the revolutionaries won't help their leaders son get his crew back together?!
Oh, I agree that the Revolutionary Army will probably play a role in reuniting the Straw Hats. After all, they've got connections, as was explained earlier in the thread. (Luffy befriended Ivankov, Sanji is on Ivankov's island, Robin is with the Revolutionaries, etc.)
I just think that the manga will now shift to solo arcs featuring each of the Straw Hats in turns. It's implied, after all, that they're all going to have their own adventures, and it would suck to just have to deal with, "Oh yeah, Zoro did some awesome shit, but we're not going to show it to you." What's more, if the Straw Hats were going to be reunited for the next arc after a time skip, what would be the point of adding the whole Rayleigh Vivre Card plot device?
I'm willing to bet that, instead of a time skip or something, Oda uses the time that Luffy spends unconscious to focus on the other 8 Straw Hats getting back to Sabaody. They don't have a convenient Shichibukai friend to take them there, so it's bound to take more time. But not more time than Luffy is going to spend recovering. I mean, even if it's Luffy, he's coping with the damage sustained throughout every Impel Down battle, loads of Magellan's poison, losing ten years of his life to recover from said poison, one shot of Emporio Vigor Hormones, damage from even more Impel Down battles, damage from a bunch of Marineford battles, exhaustion from releasing huge levels of Haki, another shot of Emporio Vigor Hormones, and the mental exhaustion from Ace's death, not to mention that he hasn't slept at all since he arrived at Impel Down.
So yeah, he'll be out of the picture for a while, which gives Oda plenty of time to get the others back to Sabaody without leaving the readers in the dark.
~~Got it memorized?