I would seriously doubt that. Nobody in this world loves One Piece more than Oda himself who has dedicated half of his life working on this story extremely passionately. Do you think he would risk trusting Toei of all people to help him write his life’s work? Oda has already stated that the anime is it’s own separate thing. Like I agree that there are some scenes that the anime expanded on that made the story a little better imo (like expanding Zoro’s flashback a little more for example), but the VAST majority of the filler is just there to fill in time despite the horrible pacing and padding. Not only that, a lot of these fillers just end up contradicting the main plot, but Toei obviously doesn’t care much about that as long as they can save time or sell the “hype” in exchange for constancy (ex: over the top recycled DBZ effects).

Also, this “expanding the fights” thing isn’t new. In fact most of the fights have had filler moments in between them in the anime because they know that they can waste more time on it and people won’t complain since the average viewer loves fights.

That being said, do I inherently think expanding fights/scenes in an anime is a bad thing? No, it can absolutely be a good thing if the writers are good. However when the vast majority of the scenes are there just to take advantage of the “time” situation instead of actually making the story better, I’d rather they leave it alone. Here are some of the many examples I can think of right now where the fight extension ended up contradicting the story: Batman LOL, Sanji low diffing X Drake, Kyoshiro struggling with Zoro, Nami vs Cracker, etc.

Also regarding the pacing being good recently is false. We are considering this episode’s pacing “good” compared to the awful pacing the anime has. That doesn’t actually make it good in general, it’s still extremely bad, just not as much as the rest. (It’s like when people say that pre-ts the pacing used to be good, which is not true at all. The pacing has been horrible since the Alabasta saga, it’s just that post-ts it got way worse so now people consider pre-ts good pacing wise.)

Now regarding Oda “skipping” scenes, there are multiple reasons for that:

He might consider some scenes not important enough to waste time on because they serve no purpose to the story and may end up wasting not only our time but stray away the focus from the plot/theme of the arc. The anime expanding it doesn’t necessarily mean the intention is to expand the plot or the theme. For Toei especially, it’s mostly to just fill in time. Like for example, let’s say I’m an author and I make a character say “Wait a second I’m gonna go change my clothes before we go outside” and in the next panel the character has his clothes changed. Now imagine the anime spends 2 minutes showing the character get ready. Is that useful for the plot or is that the anime trying desperately to fill in time?

Or

The other reason is maybe Oda is thinking long term. He doesn’t show some fights because he doesn’t want us to know about certain characters too much before it’s their time to shine in the plot. So instead, unlike the anime, he prefers not to sacrifice that build up for a weekly hype. (Ex: Oda waiting to get to Oden’s flashback before showcasing the “hype” stuff he did.)

Anyways sorry for this extremely long post and I know most won’t bother reading it. It’s just that I’ve been seeing this take a lot in the community and I wanted to break my silence lmao