

A lot of anime-only people are sort of biased against FI since this is around the point that the anime's pacing issues began to really show.

Its villains are also less noteworthy than people had expected for a location that'd been teased since Baratie Hody works well as a stand-in for the arc's themes but is otherwise sort of underwhelming, and Decken is among the most (intentionally) hatable characters in the story. Longer Answer: It isn't a bad arc, but a lot of people who were weekly readers at the time have a bad impression of it since it was fairly long, didn't really provide the Straw Hats with challenging fights for the most part, and came at a time when the Marineford arc was still fresh in the fandom's collective memory, so anything less than that felt like a downgrade to a lot of people.

Short answer: Continue it, Fishman Island is important.
