This becomes more of a shit show every week.
The traitor plot was boring and even managed to have a boring reveal. Oh, no, it was one of the Vegas, and the most useless one to boot. This may allow Oda to shed some light on the CDs genetic uniqueness, but what a roundabout way to get there.
Kuma and Bonney were set aside for "cool hype fight set up" scenes on far away islands.
The WG once more proves their shortsightedness when their greatest more curious mind starts researching something he was told not to. Have they never dealt with a teenager before? Like telling him, "You can learn about anything but not that subject" would have been enough. It shouldn't even come as a surprise. They shouldn't even need York's call on the matter. From day 1 they should've had a failcheck system in place. No, instead we get more assassins and something bigger "even than a buster call". How trite. All that scientific know how is now going to be obliterated alongside the island when they could've had one of those ubiquitos internal explosives installed in Vega and some overseers to make sure Vega neither studies the Void nor tries to remove the explosive. At that point a traitor plot would've been interesting, but a traitor to te WG, with Vega slowly making frends with one of his overseers, instilling in him the passion for history and together trying to learn about the Void. Oda would've even been able to deliver one of his trademark tearjerkers wih the overseer sacrificing himself in order to ensure the explosive is removed from Vega's body.
And of course nowadays if an arc doesn't resemble a "small war" then there's no other way to maintain the tension. We couldn't just have a lower more intimate stakes arc.
I had great expectations for a Vegapunk-centric arc. I was disappointed by the designs, by the lack of actually smart characters, by the brushed aside lore, by yet another wasted Supernova, and by a pace that's dragged out because most of the main cast, Lufy included, have nothing to do until other plot threads are first dealt with. If there's something Oda should learn from other mangas is to have more chapters without the protagonist. The pace would improve if we didn't always cut back to Luffy and the exposition would be more organic when coming up in conversation between knowing characters talking to themselves about thr situation elsewhere, without having to pointlessly address the SHs.
But I've digressed too much.