@BatDan:
I'm on the side of "Oda is a troll, Luffy will just turn 18."
I'd buy that. Sounds reasonable.
Nah, but you figure it'll probably take some time to put the crew back together. Half of them have devil fruits, and I'll be damned if they have ships stowed away on all of those islands. It'll take time…but not like 10 years or whatever.
Big timeskips are usually because you've gotten written into a corner. Oda probably knew he was doing that by splitting up the crew, weighed it, and figured that he was writing himself into a fairly tiny corner but with the value that he could finally develop the main character properly. I'm figuring that he'll keep the round up of the SHs down to a shorter length of time for each...then again, Oda's a big Dragonball fan, so a long "powerup!" timeskip is possible.
Basically, a lot of little timeskips where you have the core of the crew skipping over the time it takes to go find so-and-so and solve their issue. Then again, he might just leave that to Toei to throw together as a heap of fillers for the anime and just jump ahead in the manga...but it seems like Oda's taken a lot more interest in being involved in the filler production the past couple years.
Anyway, the entire point of what I said earlier is that Oda has dropped hints in the past that didn't turn out to work out the way people thought. He understands that it's good marketing to drive up speculation. "We're going to kill off a character", over a year later, you've got Merry. Not exactly what you thought was a character, for one, up to that point it was just the ship. He used the arc he was working on to MAKE the ship into a character, possessed with a "spirit" and such. At the time when he said it, he was pretty sure no one would guess it easily because the ship WASN'T possessed with a spirit and was hardly considered a character. He likes to throw those types of curveballs because it keeps people interested and it probably amuses the heck out of him.