I mean, peeps should have known about the very variable potency of barrier CoA when Luffy broke through Marigold's technique with Gear 2 in pre-timeskip.
In Egghead we also had Vice-admiral Doll using ACoA, and she's not some secretly YC level character lol.
There are absolutely levels of basic CoA that surpass these showings.
Chad armament Haki master hype:
And you just know similar CoO hype is on the way:
And honestly it’s old news at this point but AdCoC was just a complete mistake in every way. CoA should have had its own identity, CoC should have never become CoA 2.0, that decision was awful.
If Oda were a good writer, and had editors that didn’t deserve to be blacklisted from the industry, CoA would function the same way it is used this chapter. CoA provides the brute strength/attack/defense enhancement, while CoC has its own identity altogether.
I actually think AdCoC should have functioned similar to Asura, it should have been like a form powerup rather than becoming CoA 2 with alternate lightning. In an ideal world that would have happened, but we’re stuck in the reality where One Piece is grossly nerfed by its own writer.