User blog comment:Pacifista15/Vice Admirals vs. The World/@comment-4899461-20121018045415

Well done. Good stuff, and a bunch of other words of praise.

Also, I agree. I think we have underestimated their strength.

Here's my theory as to why that's the case: The main event we've been using to judge the strength of most people in OP has been the battle of Marineford, and in the last couple weeks, I've started to think that's a shitty measure of strength. None of the fights we saw in Marineford were solid 1v1 matches to the death/defeat. None of them were as long as what we're used to. And only a small handful of the fights ended in the clear defeat of someone (Ace, WB, Akainu, those giants, Oars, Mr. 1, and that's actually about it). There wasn't a single fight in Marineford that was shown with the same depth as what we've gotten with Vergo vs. Smoker.

I think the reason for that is because even though it was an "all-out War of The Best", Oda still held back. Oda's been hiding the blackening Haki from us until recently, and we thought we knew everything about Haki. And I'm glad he held back, I really am, because it's going to make the New World a hell of a lot more exciting if we can't predict what can come from people who's limits we thought we had pegged.