BUT recent episodes have shown a troubling trend of really overloading certain sequences with effects and extra moves that it overtakes the material. It feels part of a larger trend that hit the anime industry post One Punch Man where characters can't just hit an attack, they have to explode with energy and impact frames and the camera has to move all over the place and the ground has to blow up into perfect cubes. The recent episodes have been pretty divisive because of it.
This is what I really meant by animation style, I'm happy that the animation quality has gone up and One Piece seems to suffer less from being a weekly show than it did before in terms of week to week animation quality.
Has the pace sped up in terms of manga to anime though? I remember some episodes were like 3-4 pages of the manga padded out to 24 minutes.