@Toraish:
This is going to be one of the major parts of the discussion, no doubt, and it's something that I have debated with myself time and time again because I am, regardless of everything I have said and how I have been acting for the last few months, very concerned that I'm letting my frustration take over and turn into a self-feeding cycle of suggestion that only makes matters worse for me.
Yes, what you say about focusing on the negative is very true, and I hate the fact that it is so because sometimes I do indeed feel like I'm only glossing over everything that is good. But here's where the big difference lies, and this is the point that I have wanted to make for quite long now and will do when I properly get to it (it's almost 1am, I haven't slept in two nights, and I'm slightly feverish, so please excuse me for not doing it now guys).
It's that of not letting Oda get away too easily with something he could, with proper care and with a slower pace – i.e. with more time to spend on proper, not necessarily deep, but proper, casual, not directly plot-related interactions –, handle in a much more satisfying and fulfilling way. We all know he is, or at least has once been, capable of writing sequences like that; Alabasta, Skypiea, and especially the first ten or so chapters of Water 7 all stand testimony to that. The fact that he isn't doing it now is showing that he's either too lazy to do that, which I don't really believe in, or is just rushing through his arcs in a speed that leaves no room for that. He might even have forgotten about it, having not written it in such a long time. It's a really huge decrease in enjoyment of his writing at the moment, and I feel it shouldn't be forgiven as easily if we are to expect Oda to write a masterpiece and not just "a good shonen".
The good things are still definitely there, there's probably at least one or two moments in each chapter that could be publicly praised and that should make even a heart as jaded as mine is sing songs. But the sad thing is that, at the moment, the frustration caused by the apparent decrease in quality is overwhelming the positive of those few things. It seems to me that for every good thing that is written well, there is at least two things that could have been written better bringing it down. And I can't defend Oda as long as that is the state of affairs.
Maybe Oda has a death God that told him how long he has to live so he wants to finish it for us.