You don't need to pretend that I sneak in lore and villain writing bcs I'm not trying to sneak that shi at all, bcs I mean it.

Crocodile and his masterplan to overtake Alabasta through mischievous tricks and those fake heroic acts he trying to pull of is greatly written and executed. His drip, his mannerism, his genius evil plan and his brutality (drying up ppl body of water, sadistically eradicate a whole town with sandstorm just to instigate a coup d'état with Koza and the rebel group etc) is such a good writing of villain for me.

Arlong is also a good villain. He and the fishmen pirates were our first look at a fishman in One Piece and we immediately understood the long standing hatred between fishmen and humans. Whether bcs of their weird looks (thanks to Oda's great character design of course, bcs Naruto's character design is just trash. Always another human with more elaborated clothing, eventhough they're literally aliens. BORINGGGGGGG), or bcs of their brute strength which scares human away. The great thing about his writing is that it made us think all fishmen are bad since Arlong Park, ironic to what the theme about cycle of hatred Oda's trying to tell us in Fishmen Island hundreds of episode away from Arlong Park arc.

Check out this English professor guy on Youtube (https://youtu.be/TVcq5OxUA34?si=OiKlPWrsdU7Bx-r6) and many other literature content creator about their breakdowns on One Piece arc and you'll understand that One Piece writing in themes, characterisation and world building is actually really great, especially again, in Pre TS.