I actually thinks Daz voices a very reasonable complain. Zou was, indeed, a very, VERY wordy arc, and the bits used to offset it (the flashbacks did have some nice eye candy and some action) feel more scarce than, say, Sabaody Archipelago, an arc which balanced long exposition bouts with lots of exciting action. In that sense, this is definitely an unbalanced arc.
That said, I feel the actual talking itself. . .is pretty good stuff. There's some very sorely missed character interactions in here, the most we've had in years. There're hints of characters going through stuff, specially Sanji, which was beyond needed at this point; also, comedy has been pretty hilarious, good revelations all along, which enhanced the vision of the One Piece world as a whole, in a pretty organic way. At least, that's how I feel. Also, some of these revelations helped in enhance the characters themselves (Sanji, Momonosuke, Inuarashi and Nekomamushi. . .).
I see the Toriko comparison brought up, too. What threw me out of Toriko (even though I did read this week's chapter, and it's pretty good) was, in a great part, how its exposition and wordy passages are…pretty damned weak. These days, exposition consists mostly of [concepts] taking center stage, like the [back channel] or the [spirit wathever] or stuff like that, which makes things confusing for confusion's sake. All the while, the supposedly meaty stuff gets sidelined. I don't feel like this is what's happening here.