@Gizmo:
If Doflamingo's forces that are supposed to be guarding the Smile Factory are preoccupied with the Straw Hat crew, then that falls in line with the line of reasoning of destroying a factory and the Toy Soldier's plan of rescuing the people inside. Plus, the little people do seem to be collecting weapons.
I doubt that it's factory guards, so much as any alarm being risen will go to an empty palace or mostly empty palace.
Unless the palace is in Flower Fields, but I doubt that.
You'll need weapons to attack a factory, it being guarded doesn't mean it's guarded by the family high ups like Diamante or whoever was lounging at the palace.
We've seen grunts already.
Not saying there won't be more, but their story can be told beyond the scope of the tournament now since Rebecca has a connection to a person not participating. In fact, that's the other rationale for me not continuing the tournament. If the other plot lines are beginning to build up, then time at the tournament really is just a distraction both for Luffy and the plot until the characters within the tournament get more involved with the other story lines which would no longer need the tournament to occur for it to happen.
I REALLLLLLY doubt Jesus is going to get involved with a single thing on this island that isn't the devil fruit. I suspect the same with Bart and Cavendish. None of them are locals, they don't care about anything going on.
As of late Oda style of storytelling seems to involve more usage of having quick scenes of jumping into the middle of the action and then having flashbacks to explain what happened for the scene right before instead of showing the scenes chronologically.
Oda's done this for a long while.
I'm reading Little Garden now and he's done it a bit even there.
Plus the story in the last two arcs has been more heavy on the action with little emotional resonance,
There was tons of emotional resonance on Fishman Island, it's problems weren't that.
Punk Hazard though I strongly agree.
and Oda rushing through them (And I say rush because I think the last two arcs could've been better if given more room to breathe and proper build up for the most part, but that's another topic altogether that I don't think we need to get into here). And even then, that could be said about stuff like Marineford and Impel Down.
And Enies Lobby, and Thriller Barque, and Little Garden, and the Baratie. He's always had action arcs. Fishman Island wasn't really an action arc though.
You have said you've been enthralled with Dressrosa in a way unlike the last two arcs. It's probably because of the way Oda's telling the story of them that's different.
He's world building again, with top notch quality. Punk Hazard lacked a world, and Fishman Island was sloppy about it.
The sick thing is just a rationale I'm assuming people may have for Oda going back to this type of writing, the same rationale people used when Oda was working on Strong World, or that Oda got used to this style after working on Strong World, or when he was working on Shiki's movie. Sorta can see the same happening here in this arc. Not saying I want this, I'm just saying I could see it happening.
I really don't think there's any basis to that at all.
–- Update From New Post Merge ---
@The:
CP-0 was sent their secretly to gather intel on the Doflamingo Family, and a possible connection to Yonko Kaido and the Criminal Underworld (because I'm pretty sure Smoker mentioned that in his report to the World Government).
Doflamingo almost definitely has some deal going on with CP0. As I think it's like 90% positive that the guy he was talking to right before the timeskip was the CP0 bowler hate man.