The one chapter of Zoro unlocking KoH was better written character writing than anything Sanji has gotten post-skip.
Unlocking KoH took everything we knew about Zoro over the decades and tied it up together.
Sanji and Germa required Oda to pull the atrocious Vinsmoke family out of his ass and suddenly turn Sanji into a tormented saint with crippling self-worth issues. It was a terrible attempt to recapture the formula that had been so successful with Nami, Robin and to an extent Law. Complete with “you will find people who love you” and his own “i want to live.” But we had already seen it done before, and done better.
But those three‘s stories worked because the characters and the plotlines unfolded naturally from their introductions. We knew Nami hated pirates from the beginning, didn’t trust them, we wanted to know why, got Arlong Park to explain. We knew Robin was wanted since she was a child, had a dream the world hated, wanted to kill herself in Alabasta, for the EL and we found out why. We knew Law had a relationship with the Ds, helped Luffy despite being his enemy, then we got buildup with Doffy in PH.
Where was the buildup for Sanji’s story? Didn’t exist, other than an offhand mention of being born in North Blue. Any sign that Sanji had deep seated trauma from his childhood before we got to Zou? Nope. WCI couldn’t even give a good reason for Sanji’s woman hangup, it’s something Zeff literally beat into him? That just makes Zeff retrospectively worse. Any sign that Sanji hated royalty or immoral scientists or anything like that? Nope.
And then we did have the arc the entire thing was redundant. We knew, from the very beginning, that nothing would change. There was no chance of Oda ever doing something interesting and the arc ending in any way other than Sanji coming back to the Strawhats.
With Nami it was still early in the series, the first big rescue arc, so everyone could enjoy the ride.
With Robin, Oda genuinely did something a bit different throughout because he had the crew literally falling apart at the seams throughout.
By the time we got to Sanji we knew Oda too well and there was no chance of any interesting change. Not 800 chapters in.
Then came the actual arc, and Germa were just so amazingly, incredibly, dull. Terrible, terrible characters. Judge, what happens if you take Caeser and rip out every bit of personality. Huey, Dewey and Louie, who had exactly one personality trait each (arrogant, snarky, stupid). Reiju and Sora, who were women so Oda made them good, how thrilling and unexpected. The flashbacks only work when they have interesting characters to bounce off. That‘s why the Zeff flashback is so good. Germa did not have one interesting character in it.
Then we got to Wano, and the entire fucking fake dilemma had to be repeated again. “Oh god, does Luffy want me to be a kind hearted cook or a cold hearted killer?” We just had an eighty chapter arc that answered that question, never mind the decades of material before it. I’m genuinely amazed so many people bought “evil Sanji”.
Give me Zoro being himself and building on what has came before anyday over Sanji’s melodramatic bullshit. The ending to Wano was, quite obviously, far from perfect, and Zoro’s plotline in particular suffered from it. But I’ll take that any day of the week over Zoro after twenty years suddenly becoming an emotional basketcase crying outside a teenagers bedroom with a by-the-numbers flashback to explain it.