User blog comment:JustSomeDude.../Dressrosa - The Greatest Filler Arc!/@comment-3351696-20140424014054

Gotta give som credit to Oda for this also. He has been giving Toei a lot more room to improvise in recent years...

A good example of this is the situation with Sanji and Violet. In the manga we were never shown how Sanji was captured. This gave Toei a lot of room for filler content, it didn't change the outcome, but it's 100% better than extra episodes with Foxy. My guess is that Oda has been doing this on purpose, because these small time-skips seem to happen more often now than before.