@ARC-1300:
Except every adaptation of anything in history does this. Doesn't make it wrong. To animation, to Hollywood blockbusters.
A lot of them even benefited from such techniques. Never the less I'm fine with them getting the pace treatment , just feel it's largely unnecessary.
Best to compare it to the recent One Piece episodes. Compared to them, the early episodes in One Piece took a lot of creative liberties compared to the new ones. The new episodes, if you discount filler and padding and occasional censorship, are much more manga faithful in their content.
Early arcs like Syrup Island take some comparatively large and seemingly random changes from the manga events. I'm not just talking about sequencing, which still happens in the modern episodes, but randomly changing character actions and events and choosing NOT to adapt several panels in the manga for no clear reason. Very unusual for the modern day, because they virtually always adapt every single panel nowadays.
In addition to pacing, the One Pace project has also had a keen focus on manga faithfulness. That is with an asterisk–whenever it can be fixed without ugly music edits. As such, some padding and filler content still remains in parts of One Pace in addition to out-of-order sequencing when clean editing simply isn't feasible. But the goal is to improve it whenever possible.
The end game is to do One Pace adaptations of the whole series, so Syrup Island was going to be done sooner or later