@Maxy:
It's always possible to pull yourself out of a bad direction, if you just create an interesting story. even a series that crashes because of a poor choice of arc can pull itself up, I mean Sket Dance used to crash and burn all the time and now look at it. I don't think much of Hungry Joker, but it's got enough potential now that a few good choices could save it from itself. If it doesn't manage that then I'll call it dying at the 19-chapter mark in lieu of Cross Manage (Date-senpai's already done for, so I doubt even the death of HJ could save that).
Also we're gonna have to agree to disagree on the one-shot. I'm still amazed that thing won the gold future cup
A Shounen Action title does not have any time to screw around with itself within the first few months of its publication. The weeks go by so quickly an author barely has time to react by altering a story quickly to somehow make it interesting. Once the author figures out what he's doing wrong (assuming he actually DOES figure it out), it will be too late and his serie will probably have gathered too many low scores to survive.
Pulling oneself out of a bad direction can only work if you already established yourself like Kishi or Kubo and survived the potential axe from the beginning. If you start receiving a lot of low scores (like Kubo), you have the freedom to stand back, collaborate with your editor, and determine strategies to boost your ratings (like Bleach from a few months ago to now). However, with a new action serie like HJ, the author can do very little to survive if his story starts out really poor and suffers in ranking. The Shounen Action genre is ridiculously competitive while the comedy/slice of life genre is more lenient (which is probably why Sket Dance survived. The author had time to make significant changes in the story because Jump is probably more lenient with that particular genre verses the action/adventure one. Also luck plays a considerable role in a serie's survival, but I'm not going to delve into that.)