The Kaido one-shot irritates me much more than I thought it would initially. From a storytelling perspective, it kinda makes sense that Kaido would do this because he's hyped as the "Strongest Creature". From a powerscaling perspective, it kinda doesn't make sense because of everything we saw Luffy go through in the last arc, but I can easily write that off as Kaido being infinitely stronger than Katakuri and Cracker. The problem I have with it is how the one-shot is handled afterwards. After getting knocked out, Luffy learns Ryou because he sees Kaido's scales as the issue, but that wasn't the entire problem. None of his training (at least what we saw of it) had anything to do with improving his durability. He was just fighting fodder (provided by Queen because of logic). Even if Luffy can damage Kaido this time, for all intents and purposes, he should still get one-shot.
The biggest mistake I think this series made was jumping straight to Yonko. It was far too soon for any of the strawhats to challenge Yonko, so Oda wrote himself into a corner when trying to justify their survival. He had to make the antagonists incredibly incompetent. Which is incredibly disappointing, considering that these are supposed to be the strongest pirates of this era. We should have spent some time exploring the New World, maybe run into some supernovas, get more accustomed to the differences between this sea and Paradise.
