One thing you have to respect Oda for is his patience. Just how does he resist spilling the beans on everything for so many fucking years?!
- Jinbe is first mentioned right after Baratie. Doesn't appear in the story until chapter 500.
- Shanks is introduced in chapter 1. 1000+ chapters later and the fact we still know next to nothing about his motivations, abilities, etc. is astonishing.
This is one of the main reasons why his world never shrinks and is ever-expanding.
Like DBS introduced 12 universes and was going one by one for a while...then they just throw everything out there and there’s SOME mystery still left with the 4 other universes but there’s hardly anything left to explore.
Or Naruto where we had only seen two villages and they had just introduced the samurai. Then they freaking have all the Kage they just introduced get beaten in one summit and just kinda spew out everything about the world at large at once.
The payoff OP gets because of this through its reveals is just on another level. For example, just try to imagine if the Yonko bounties were given to us with their intro in Water 7.