User blog comment:Woohoot/Overhyped Grandline/@comment-24850639-20150130170206

Think about for the sake of the story. By all means you should believe that sailing those seas is treacherous, but do you honestly think anything they'll encounter at sea (be it storms or other weird phenomena) will be enough to kill them? As someone said before, yeah most pirates spend most of their time actually sailing, but would the show be anywhere near as exciting as it is if the focus WEREN'T on what they did on land? It'd really get repetitive and annoying if all the major battles happened at sea on enemy ships, or the sunny. So what can really make the grandline as dangerous as people say? The people.

So I see where you're coming from in terms of the dangers being a little overhyped, but the "dangers" of sailing these seas aren't really the focus of the story, despite the fact they're pirates. The PEOPLE they'll encounter in the New World are a completely different story obviously since that's where all the big names are, but Oda is definitely gonna focus this series on the interpersonal aspects of things, not life on the sea. It would seem that most crews have the wherewithal to sail the grand line, but not anyone could have beat Crocodile. Enel. Rob Lucci. Moriah. Sparked Rayleigh's interest. Gotten help like that from Kuma. Hopefully you see my point. Even in the first half of the grand line, think of how many situations the SH crew have been in that would have killed them had it not been for dumb luck.