With regards to Big Mom becoming more and more evil, I remember the beginning of the arc, where we were first introduced to Totto Land as a utopia made entirely of sweets where tons of races lived in singsong harmony. It always had an evil factor of Big Mom's maliciousness in getting what she wanted, but overall life seemed to be pretty good, which is why pretty much everyone here and there and everywhere started wondering how the country would be peeled back to show how dark it truly was. Well, we've gotten quite a bit of it so far, because as the Eagles would say, "You can check out anytime you like…but you can never leave!" Big Mom has always been seen as an evil and corrupt businesswoman, and though I do agree that perhaps some of her initial personality features could have been kept, there was also the matter of Big Mom throwing her weight around to make deals in her favor rather than settling on more equal agreements and sometimes straight up massacring people and stealing stuff. So ultimately, Big Mom more and more resembling a schemer set out to use deals for her own means rather than an actual businesswoman hasn't been too much of a shock. Though I do like how she can gain respect for other people based on their goals and achievements, like she did with Pedro and Brook, and would like to see a bit more of that.
@Razh:
Even if it's most of them, there's a lot of potential witnesses when you number the objects with all the actual people that witnessed the escape and then all the other people and objects who might have overheard what's going on. I can sort of buy it that Big Mom doesn't know since her quarters are isolated or something. And she might have been napping when Pedro bombed the place.
But Mont D'Or and all those other guys at the table? Opera sure is a capable guy when he managed to contain the information of Luffy's escape and Jinbe's betrayal all while being knocked out.
This is what happens when the plot becomes too complicated. The author starts cutting corners and it's even more noticeable in this arc than it was in Dressrosa.
If you want to justify each suspicious fortunate coincidence which helps the good guys succeed, that's fine but you can at least appreciate that people who are complaining have valid complaints. Either that or Big Mom has been making kids with her cousins or something.
Just to be clear, I don't think most of the complaints here are illegitimate or baseless, since a lot of it is subjective anyways. I didn't even really care for the chapter that much, just had different perspectives on certain things that I wanted to make a case for.
With regards to the witnesses, I feel like several others did a pretty good job of talking about the overall fear of Big Mom that seems to be infecting the place and is causing the crew to slip up a bit. There's Opera and the numerous other mooks whose job was to keep the whole situation under control but failed, likely resulting in huge consequences should they tell Big Mom that they did so. Then there's Smoothie, who's coordinating the entire effort with the intention of keeping it as much under wraps as possible, since she doesn't want to risk triggering Big Mom's wrath the day before the wedding. This, combined with the enormous size of the Chateau, doesn't exactly contribute to an environment where communication flows smoothly. Then there's the homies. I would probably agree that your argument is legitimate if the homies had been seen throughout the arc as devotees to Big Mom who specifically want to help her. But other than Napoleon, Zeus, and Prometheus, that doesn't seem to be the case. The homies are just sort of there on Whole Cake, floating around without any really specific pattern to their actions. There's the homies in the Seducing Woods that specifically want to kill, there's the homies that just sing all the time, and there are the food homies that don't even want to be eaten. While all of them are completely subservient to Big Mom, not once has a homie, except for the three mentioned above, taken action to help Big Mom on their own initiative.