just want to give my two sense in the matter. i think that the opinion you have is valid in so far as it being your opinion but i think along the same lines of foxy and and xperience when it comes to the factual nature of the matter. the way the story is built (from what i have gathered) is for a character to get a large amount of development when they join and leading up to that and during their "cementing" in the crew if you will. robin and nami are actually the best examples of this. probably around 1/4 of the series deals with arcs that center around or deal heavily with the decisions of nami and robin and the situations they are force into. the next kind of development we tend to see is short bursts of character change that might fill up half a chapter to two chapters (total page length not actual length throughout the arc). you could see this in nami befriending the children or sanji becoming mr. prince or choppers dialogue with moca. these are timed so that they do not interfere with the story progression and for the most part that whats these two arcs are since they are propelling us head first into the new world. that is why i suppose that you could see a lack of character development from a certain point of view buts thats just because oda is engaging in world and environment development. the fact that women even do anything besides heal and bitch in a shonen battle manga should amaze you as it does me. gotta give oda props there. enjoyed the disscusion hopw to have more here in the forums as i am rather green. hope you dont take this as a lecture :)
Yes I agree, I think it is expected that characters certainly have a big progression in the beginning, and then it gets added piece by piece. However I certainly wish more could be shown with the 4 mentioned. Sanji becoming Pr. Prince and the double personality from Usopp are great imo, and Zoro, Luffy have had a good amount of it consistently as well, I just wish the others would have some nice surprise changes also. I suppose this is where the opinions change, just how much is enough from the panels currently being shown for a specific set of characters, where I still do not think is enough/could have been written better and others see it differently.