Because it eventually has to end. The publishers have other stories lined up ready to take One PIece's place (not to mention the animes run time after it ends). You act as if it's gonna end next year or something when we probably have hundreds of chapters left to go.
Yes, it will go one for a while but there is steady progress to the goal. There is an end point. The journey is long, not neverending.
I'm sure the 5 different fights with Kaido and 2 minute long punches were needed for the story to "breathe" and show Kaido's overwhelming strength right?
A lot of that was in the anime. And yes, it was necessary to take long to beat Kaidou. Crocodile took 3 fights. Kaidou is an emperor. He was feared by the WG which we know has godlike being such as Imu and the Planets. Same goes for BM. If they went down easily, then the story would not make as much sense in hindsight. You have to take into account future-proofing the arcs. Also, you mentioned you could remove 100+ chapters from every arc, care to elaborate as to what you feel could be cut? With details, of course.
What you've stated is not an inevitability and the prime example of this is literally every dragged out show in western animation still having a sizable viewerbase. You wanna know the real reason as to why One Piece is more popular than ever? It's because anime is becoming more popular in the west meaning that every shows viewerbase is getting larger unless it's genuine hot garbage from start to finish like Seven Deadly Frames Sins.
Yeah, no. Anime is more popular and One Piece has been the spearhead. If people were losing interest, it would fall off. It would have fallen off well before it reached mainstream success in the west. Even if we accept that One Piece fell of after the time-skip, the time-skip started in 2010. Are you telling me that the good will gotten from the pre-time-skip era was enough to sustain through a 10-year era of slop before the manga reached mainstream? Do you think that people were reading about a story they hated, paid for merch depicting characters that bored them and were giving watching YT videos dissecting arc they disliked for a DECADE?! Goddamn! Are you taking the fentanyl version of copium?!
Shows that fall off completely after a slump do not make this amount of cash for such a long time. 2 years would have been fine. 5 years would have been understandable if unlikely. But 10?
Come on! The MCU fell of the moment Phase Bore came around and has remained there with few exceptions. Marvel declared bankruptcy a year after they fired Jim Shooter and quality control fell to the level of Satan's wine cellar. Later, sales for Iron Man, Spiderman, Captain America and Carol Danvers tanked harder than WW2 France during Blitzkrieg when each character had their respective controversial storyline. Image was exposed as a bunch of painters masquerading as writers almost immediately. DC's New 52 sucked from the beginning and sales reflected it. DCEU achieved nothing and died. Star Wars crashed the moment Ryan Johnson said "It's Johnsoning time" and Johnsoned all around. Sony's "Spiderman without Spiderman" universe was basically an aborted experiment regarding any movie without Venom in its name. Also, Disney. How is the box-office for those remakes?
Slop does not last this long. Good will runs out at lightspeed.
If I wrote like Oda, I would've failed every creative writing and English class in college for going over the page limit and making my papers and stories an absolute bore to read. You need to realize that conciseness increases impact in a story and it's something Oda and Toei struggle with.
Trust me, that says a whole lot more about how much of a sham college is than anything else.
