>>281450905
I'm not saying Smoker is particularly strong, but I do hate how modern discourse about power levels (which is in itself stupid when it comes to One Piece) is all about agendaposting, and with side characters like Smoker it's always making arguments based on specific scenes and then using them to power scale. Like we've seen Luffy taking L's and W's, but we know that overall he's grown stronger despite the occasional loss. He's earned the place where he is now, and while there's disagreement over whether he's de facto "Yonko level", most agree that he's very strong, because we have a lot to base that evaluation on, we KNOW Luffy is "Yonko Level", whatever that means.
But we only see occasional glimpses of characters like Smoker, and those tend to be the more dramatic losses. Either we see him after he's beaten some random no-name pirate, which is no "feat", or we see him getting pummeled by someone like Doflamingo, so all we see is him taking out mooks and being no-diffed by the big bads, which creates this very one-sided and likely very inaccurate picture of the character for anyone who's trying to measure their worth based on strength alone. Like, we KNOW Koby has feats below his belt before Honesty Impact, since we KNOW the Rocky Port incident happened. But we didn't SEE it, so power levelers and agendaposters can't comprehend it as anything but meaningless lore that doesn't inform Koby's actual "worth", ie, his power level.
This isn't quite the case with someone like Law, who we have seen partaking and succeeding in taking down a Yonko, despite also seeing him losing to Blackbeard, another Yonko. Because we have both feats and losses, so the average reader knows he's strong despite his loss. But agendaposters can pick and choose one and disregard the other, and all that power levelers see is that Law is weaker than Blackbeard, but stronger than Big Mom. Smoker doesn't have this because he's a tertiary character with less screen time.