At Puffing Cinema's request, I'm copying in my post from here, because it absolutely fits the purpose of this thread as well as it does the weekly discussion.
I kinda pitched this in the Greg thread too, but I think it wouldn't have taken a lot of little changes to improve the reception of Nami and Ulti. I don't want to rewrite the whole last 20 chapters to squeeze a complete dedicated fight in there. Oda decided he didn't want that, and it's his story. But I think a few small editorial changes to framing and dialogue (and one significant switcheroo) could make a big difference in how people expected things to go and how this sequence _feels to read. This is how I would improve the Nami/Ulti reading experience without adding more chapters, or even more pages, to the story Oda's decided to tell about them:
The fight starts the same way it did before. Nami and Usopp draw the attention of Page One and Ulti in the Performance Floor melee, are cornered in the bathhouse and quickly overwhelmed, with the dinosaur siblings simply pushing through all their attacks with brute force. Nami has her moment of defiance before being rescued by Tama's group. I think all of that works fine the way it is.
But Oda set up too early that Zeus is going to be the solution. Lots of people, including myself, guessed it from Nami's "I need stronger lightning" line in chapter 1004. So obviously that has to go. Also in that chapter, change the moment where Ulti gets knocked down and expresses pain from Nami's Thunder Lance. We're not going to flag lightning as the solution this early by even letting it do minor damage. Ulti shrugs it off, and the dialogue needs to go more like "none of our best moves even penetrate their scales… just focus on slowing them down and keeping them away from Tama!!" Basically, we want to say that this isn't a stand-and-fight scene for Nami and Usopp. Protecting the girl while she slings dumplings is their new mission. They're not even thinking about beating the dinosaur siblings anymore. Maybe people speculate that someone else can pick up the slack and save them, like Sanji.
The first Nami/Usopp scenes in chapter 1011 are alright, with Usopp's big hits leaving Page One totally unfazed. It's from the end of this chapter through to the start of 1013 I think we need the biggest change.
The choreography of the scene needs to be rearranged so that _Ulti gets punched out by Big Mom, whether or not she uses CoC coating for it. Page One fills Ulti's role in the next few chapters. He attacks Komachiyo and hits Tama. At the end of 2012, Nami can't "stay here and crush [him]," unfortunately. We need to keep up the feeling that fighting these guys head on isn't what Nami and Usopp are meant to do. Maybe a line more like "I know I can't beat you, but I can't let you get any closer to Tama!" would fit the mood better.
At this stage, we still think the dinosaurs are simply untouchable to Nami and Usopp, and all that can be done is buy time. Tama remains the focus. And then Big Mom nails Page One with the Maser Cannon and he goes down. Importantly, he _stays down. We learn that Big Mom's lightning is strong enough the pierce dinosaur scales, fry them from the inside, and take them out of the fight once and for all. Nami expresses shock that any amount of lightning could actually manage that. Chapter 1013 continues as usual, with Zues reappearing and having his fakeout death.
Fast forward to 1016 and it's not as much of a shock when Ulti comes back again, because she was only punched out, not electrolasered to death. But because Page One _has stayed down, we know that a thunderbolt that gets under the skin is an effective attack on a tough dinosaur. Instead of Zeus expositing that one more lightning blast should do it, we need to give Nami agency in the conflict and put her in the problem solving role. She asks Zeus if he could do something like what Big Mom did if she helped him get some more charge. Nami does some weather tricks to charge the air with static and give Zeus a boost (since he can't team up with Prometheus and Napoleon like Hera did for her big lightning) and tells Usopp to get Tama clear, which he easily does. The rest of the chapter proceeds as normal, with the blast and redirection.
I know that this version still isn't going to be what a lot of people were hoping for with a big, extended fight where Nami and Usopp solve problems for themselves and so on, but that's not my story to write. It couldn't be done without changing too many other things. I'm just trying to think of the best version of Oda's story. This way we downplay the idea of a direct fight early on. We add a bit of symmetry and consistency with both dinosaur siblings being taken down by supercharged lightning blasts rather than one being just punched and the other taking two finishing moves back to back. We make it feel like Nami saw what Big Mom did to KO one dinosaur and chose to team up with Zeus to imitate it on the remaining one, rather than have Zeus just tell her how to finish off one that was already injured. Little things, but they could make a big difference to what people expected the finale to be, setting it up to be what it actually is, and do so without dramatically changing the established length and pacing of the arc.____