I just think its interesting that people think Blackbeard or Shanks or Im or Akainu's presence will be significantly smaller than anything we've gotten so far with Big Mom or Kaido.
Think about the last 350 chapters for a second. It pretty much covers the following:
- Doflamingo
- The Strawhat Fleet
- Big Mom
- 9 Scabbards
- Kaido
Including all of their tangential arc related characters per arc (Caesar, Riku, Rebecca, Minks, Pudding, Hiyori, etc)
While one can "hope" Oda trims the fat in this regard, he notoriously doesn't or really hasn't in the last 10 years or so. Does anyone really expect Elbaf to not have 20 named characters and be longer than intended? Does anyone really expect that if he does a Vegapunk centric arc, it will only focus on Vegapunk? I mean he named dropped the SSG, that is the Special Science GROUP, indicating there are multiple people who work for Vegapunk as a team. If he brings out CP-0 finally, does anyone really think he won't reveal all of the masked identities and designs?
How about the pure fact that the last 350 chapters (will be almost 450 by the time we are done with Wano), we've only truly dealt with one Shichibukai and 2 Yonko (and thats IF BM and Kaido fall this arc). We still have 2 additional Yonko, the Marines, the WG and the myriad of good and bad factions that are all tied together with this (SSG, CP-0, Underworld, Revolutionaries, etc, etc etc). While I don't expect Oda to spend longer than he has for other arcs on these factions, its very likely he will want to characterize and build as much as he can.
We've spent 200 chapters nearly with Big Mom now, a 100+ for Doflamingo and nearing a 100 for Kaido. How would it feel if Shanks, Blackbeard, Im and Akainu, COMBINED got less than 150 chapters of exposure for the remainder story? All while sharing panel and screentime with their subordinates (Admirals, Gorosei, Yonko Commanders) former villains, Shichibukai, the SHF, Supernova and more. Do you think Oda has the capacity to characterize everything that is vastly bigger than what we currently have the past 4 arcs in a much smaller timeframe?
Unless you expect One Piece to finish like Bleach (ie, cancelled or stopped short with no resolution for many of its characters), one starts to really understand how its almost not possible for Oda to finish in 5 years from this point.
Not to mention...we aren't even done with Wano, Kaido and Big Mom