Enies Lobby and Water 7 are overrated. In fact I would say it's the part where One Piece starts to show cracks. It starts insanely good. We have character drama, mystery, cool new characters. But after the arc everything resets back to zero because this is a long-running shonen that still has to be milked for a long time.
Water 7 is amazing up until the point where CP9 want to kill Iceberg. Then everything falls apart. CP9 has Iceberg and Paulie tied up and the whole Strawhat crew is down. Their reasoning is that they want to pin the crime of killing Iceberg on the strawhats... but they don't kill him, they just leave him in a burning building with the strawhats and a bunch of people still around. These guys just lost all credibility as being serious villains. Which is funny, considering they are supposed to be a secret service type group that specializes in assassinations and other shady things. Iceberg can tell everyone that Strawhats are the good guys and the gubberment is evil, if he survives. Which of course he does... Depsite being tied up in front of 4 professional assassins.
Lucci is a horrible, boring character. His flashback is cringe. He kills Nero, his own comrade, but couldn't kill a defenseless Iceberg. Spanda is also horrible. This is the first arc where the main villains weren't amazing in a One Piece arc. The general story is a rehash of Nami's arc. Robin goes with the bad guys because she thinks her crew is in danger. And despite that the crew goes to save her against her wishes... Which is what happens with Nami. Not that it's a big deal, but I see people say all the time how Sanjis arc in WCI is a rehash of Robins arc... but never how Robins arc is a rehash aswell...
Anyway, this is also the first arc where the story seems to get dragged out with unneccessary bullshit. After the initial sequence in the town, did we really need the part where they chase Robin in the train and fight filler villains? That whole part could have been cut out. Make Sanji try to rescue Robin while they are still at the station, fail, and then let the crew regroup and go straight to Ennies lobby. While in Enies Lobby proper there also seem to be a lot of distractions and running around... Weird character designs also seem to appear in this arc, with the whole Franky family looking absolutely stupid.
The crew just loses against CP9 with no chance against them, only to completely wipe them out the next day. Luffy vs Usopp is great drama at the start, but ofc it doesn't matter in the end. Not only do the elite assassins not kill Iceberg, the elite 5 Vice admirals also have no chance of catching Luffy and his crew. The government/marines were a complete joke in this arc even though it was setting them up to be really dangerous and elite.
Just a rant, I don't hate Water 7/Enies lobby and they have a lot of great moments. But I think they are overrated and we can see things appear here that would plague most post-timeskip arcs aswell.