@zeltrax225:
Oda lost his touch in that aspect. What made One Piece great is more than the adventure and the world building, it was the chemistry and the dynamics of the Straw Hats, along with how they were utilized each arc.
Now you can remove certain strawhats in certain arcs and nothing changes.
Maybe it's an ego thing when your franchise gets so big and everyone just praise you like some kind of god, you're never really stuck in writing because everything you write is automatically really good now without even trying.
Thing is, the straw hats besides the selected few has become caricatures of themselves and how Oda has been handling them now is many times worse than before.
In return, he uses the panel time to hype up stuff that will sell and to as much as possible cram complicated plotlines and side character arcs(not strawhats) into one island.
There's possibly two reasons why he has been doing this so often and why it is so apparent now, mainly because he doesn't think he can do wrong or that he can ever be flawed in handling characters.
I mostly agree with your post, but I was giving some more thought to it before my response. Your analysis says a lot about how I feel, but feeling are always a little confusing.
That said, your two highlighted reasons aren't the same thing?? haha
Anyway, I think your reasoning is completely plausible, although I wouldn't exclude other hypothetical reasons for Oda's current handling of things. Maybe it's something as simple as the author losing his fire, or at least losing his interest in some aspects and characters of his life-long work. Or maybe he just believes that characters that were in the spotlight for so long (the strawhats) should go to the background for new things to be explored in their place.
That said, I think Oda has become an author corrupted by a lot of writing vices. He takes too many shortcuts and pander to some easy hype and he already knows what pleases the people.
Which is why he cram so many of them and tie all of them up in one island. It's more of a checklist that lacks the heart and soul it used to have and because he is so used to doing it, characters become one liners or a list of traits to him instead of feeling more like real actual personalities. That also carries over to how he handles the straw hats.
He has this granduer vision of his storyline and his world building that he has to(or perhaps forgotten) sacrifice character writing in return.
But he's also sharp, in the sense that he knows its human nature to enjoy emotional drama. So now occasionally he drops a backstory or two or create an emotional chapter to balance things out.
I'm not saying he is failing at his grand story but I'm just saying I'm having a ton more fun reading the pre-timeskip arcs with the rich interactions than the flashiness of the new world arcs.
Yes, I agree… but in my opinion WCI was a step in the right direction.