Now now, while it's true that the "finding one piece" part was done extremely poorly and making it a complete "time and robin gated" chase was a huge mistake, IMO, let's not forget that, despite everything, the thing about One Piece has always been "the journey". It's never about the finishing line.
Remember Sabaody, Luffy didn't wanna know if the One Piece was real or not from Rayleigh. He BELIEVED it was, and wanted to find out for himself.
If he never found it, he would have lived a life of adventures and discoveries with people precious to him. There's no "loss" in this.
Cheesy? Yes. But it's One Piece. It has always been cheesy. This "purity" has always been one of its qualities.
I don't like how everything stacks so Luffy can reach the end goal. How he's basically the only one who can, since he has Robin, the only person we know that can read the poneglyphs (apparently Pudding should be able to thanks to some mysterious third eye power, but so far, nothing), but unfortunately that's something that happened in Zou. Zou presented us the Road Poneglyphs. That already "ruined" the journey by making Luffy the only one capable of reaching it. How many people here trash Zou for this?
I think Oda's biggest problem is his "checklist". He simply can't pick what to write, so he puts everything on his mind into the story, creating a claustrophobic mess ever since Dressrosa.
Now, while I do also prefer the simplicity of days of old, having the story reach a bigger scale is completely natural. I don't speak power wise with people destroying islands or some other DBZ crap, but conflicts, etc. You start helping a poor farmer, later you are helping an entire kingdom.
I simply hope we, AT MOST, get some "shadow asgard" moment from Kaido and Luffy finishes him for good in front of everyone and that's it. The people from WG see it, news spread. We get new bounties, some lore drops, catchup on what's going on in the world and move on to the next arc.
