I think Oda's trying to be cautious with Mihawk. He can't use just anyone as his hypetool in both ways, for example him just dunking on Vista would have been nice but not that great in the grand scheme of things
And something like him beating Issho would be great but has to be handled with care. It has to be written well and not just be a way of him having a hypetool
Not sure if this'll make sense
If anything I'm thankful for this
Shanks fans are really the only (main) ones that genuinely enjoyed the Greenbull wifi haki moment. To the point where an entire chunk of the community (not just Admiral fans, don't cope) call it "Film Red promotion" because of how random and stupid it was
Essentially feeding a newly introduced character like Greenbull to the wolves was so goofy and it felt out of place
That's why it's super annoying to hear that Zoro fans want Oda to do the same thing and "feed" Fuji/Sengoku to Mihawk simply to hype him. Someone like Garling getting trashed in a flashback is fine because we know that isn't Garling's peak, there's a lot more of his story left to tell and he still had room for growth (similar to BB who's constantly clowned but everyone knows he hasn't reached the pinnacle)
In the current day all it does is kill the interest in characters that will remain the same going into the final saga. Truthfully no one really
wants to see these strong characters used as hypetools
It's cool and all but once you actually sit down and think about it for a moment you realize just how dumb it is