@Celestial D. Dragon Well of course the problem here is that there is no story avenue to both measure Ryuma’s feats against Mihawk and no story avenue for Zoro to replicate any of ryumama feats let alone surpass them
Ryuma’s feats are
1. Making a Shusui a black blade
2. Cutting the dragon that was terrorizing wano
3. Single-handedly keeping the entire WG out of Wano during his life time
First of all Since Mihawk made a STRONGER black blade than Ryuma did, we can’t tell whether this translates to mihawk being stronger since we don’t know how black blades work… At the very least, if you want to say that the strengthh he not the black blade doesn’t matter, that would mean this Ryuma feat is equal to Mihawk’s, not greater
second we can’t scale whatever dragon Ryuma cut to anything currently. The dragon Zoro cut in punk hazard is obviously too weak to be considered something that could “terrorize all of Wano”
keeping the WG out of Wano is as big a portrayal point as a Yonko putting up a flag on an island to declare it their territory so the government doesn’t attack it… this is demonstrated when it paralleled in the modern day when the new Ryuma of Wano, Luffy, puts his flag on Wano saying no one will bother Wano because of it… So since we can’t scale a feat from this, the best we can give Ryuma is Yonko level portrayal since Oda made a direct parallel to this with Yonko Luffy… Well then again, Yonko level has also already been given to Mihawk which again doesn’t really out Ryuma above him
so that’s it. As far as we can tell, there’s no real reason to arbitrarily claim Ryuma is stronger than mihawk and there is no feasible way of saying Zoro has surpassed Ryuma.
We will know Zoro has surpassed mihawk because he will defeat mihawk… How will we know Zoro has surpassed Ryuma? Will it because Zoro makes all 3 of his swords black? Okay but we don’t know whether that necessarily says anything about your strength. Both Ryuma and mihawk are one sword style users and so both of them have one black blade. How do we know they couldn’t make two black blades if they were two sword users?
There is no scale for the dragon Ryuma cut so Zoro isn’t going to be able to show he has surpassed that feat
Zoro is not going to single-handedly keep the WG out of Wano so he ain’t surpassing that
See? There’s obvious problems with this claim that Ryuma is suddenly Zoro’s benchmark when there is no in-story methods of Zoro even measuring himself to him