@Robby:
Like, when we first met Kaidou it said he had been defeated seven times and captured eighteen times, repeatedly tortured and given the death sentence forty times. I'mm not sure why seeing one of his seven losses (was that even one of the seven?) devalues him. He's been beatable since the start… just unkillable. Also, other villains that have been beaten before we had Luffy take them on, Wapol and Moria, and the Hody pirates got wrecked constantly and effortlessly before they took their drugs, and even then they got beaten super easily. No one in the East Blue posed a real threat until Arlong's crew, Bellamy was a complete one-shot joke, Luffy was immune to Enel and had a huge advantage against him. Ceaser and Monet weren't much challenge outside of trickery, and Big mom's crew was mostly dealt with easily outside of Katakuri and BM herself.. and all of Kaidou's goons have been soundly wrecked before the Strawhats ever fight them. . And of course poster boy Blackbeard, likely final villain of the series, has lost against Magellan and Whitebeard and opted to not fight Shanks or Admirals, and Burgess got wrecked by Sabo. Oda's not all about doing invincible omnipotent villains, that's Naruto and Bleach territory. Oda gives them foibles and has them lose sometimes... even if its something like where with Kaidou it might have just been a matter of being drunk. Meanwhile Kaidou has effortlessly taken out all the supernova including Luffy and gone toe to toe with Big Mom for days. He's fine.
Well, the first and most obvious reason that people like me take issue with Kaidou in comparison to his introduction, is that those prior defeats are not shown, whereas the Kaidou we do see seems untouchable and threatening, so that past history doesn’t really register as strikes against him. Similarly, a single look at Crocodile at his very introduction shows that he too has suffered defeat – big scar on his face, a missing hand. But the story never dwells on these things, never shows a flashback where Croc suffers those injuries and is put in a position of vulnerability or defeat- he’s the big bad untouchable bastard until the end of Alabasta. That wouldn’t have been the case if we’d seen an flashback of Whitebeard badly maiming him.
Same with pretty much every other example you listed. We don’t see Wapol getting exiled. We don’t see Moriahs past defeat. Even the “weak” East blue villains stood tall until encountering Luffy – theres no scene of Mihawk punking Don Krieg before Luffy takes him on (and gets put through the wringer, I might add). When someone like Enel does suffer a heavy blow from a secondary character, the story makes sure to have him instantly bounce back and suddenly reframe him as even more untouchable than he previously appeared. By framing the villains like this it makes it so much more satisfying when Luffy beats them; if someone else had smacked Bellamy around before Luffy, that one-hit KO simply would not have worked.
I’m not sure why you would bring up the New Fishman pirates, considering they are widely seen as some of, if not the least threatening and least effective villains in the entire series.
The second reason is the context and framing of Kaidous introduction, where the whole point is to show a Kaidou so untouchable that he tries killing himself for shits and giggles and suffers no damage from throwing himself off a sky island. Within this context, saying that Kaidou has been captured and attempted executed several times reads as just another example of how impervious to dying this guy is. Kaidou is such a monster that he basically lets himself gets captured, the marines can try torturing and executing him over and over and it doesn’t work – in fact, he finds it amusing! This last bit is DIRECTLY stated by the Odaboxes. In that context Kaidous past does not read as him being incompetent, or cheating death by the skin of his teeth. That would run counter to the entire point of his introduction; "Heres this completely unstoppable force who gambles his life for shits and giggles because he can’t die!"*
- (actually he’s not that unstoppable, and almost died plenty of times).
The latter interpretation is only surfacing now in order to rationalize that Kaidou faring this badly now is “not a big deal, actually”.Basically In terms of how Kaidou has been framed onscreen, especially in his introduction, it was not as the kind of guy who would’ve been taken out in two strikes if not for an underhanded assist from an underlings underling. He was the "Guillotines can't cut him and he laughs about it" kind of guy.
And then theres the issue in how depicting Kaidou this way affects the tragic impact of the flashback. Usually, the tragedy relies on completely insurmountable obstacles. No one could defeat Arlong at the time, etc. But here, the obstacle was apparently quite surmountable, and so the tragedy I guess is that Oden could've handled things but was a moron?