Sorry to dredge this up but:
Quality and entertainment are different concepts and they can and should be seperated.
To be sure, but I'd contend in return that whatever quality the likes of
One Piece has to offer
beyond joyous entertainment will not in practice prove all that stimulating (intellectually or otherwise) to your average adult, not least to one already immersed in a wealth of more enriching fiction out there (Oda's ardent speeches on friendship and ambition and hamhandedly thematic set-pieces are not very likely to move a regular consumer of Dickens novels).
My two cents on evaluating works of art: If
Dragon Ball moves you better, resonates with you better, commands more power for you, then should it ultimately matter that
One Piece is undeniably the more ambitious, the more complex, the more deliberately plotted, the more tightly controlled? Now of course tight control, careful plotting, etc. and all manner of the qualities
OP flexes in higher proportion than
DB are generally (and rightly) held as a few of the paramount criteria involved in assessing the merit of a work of art. But if the total effect of all that comes up short by comparison in your actual experience of the works, then surely there must be qualities about the latter (e.g. dry humor, charm, more natural storytelling), or damaging defects about the former (e.g. routine melodrama, oversimple themes), which you haven't properly considered in your assessment. There must be
reasons, after all, why you wind up preferring
DB to
OP. And these are worth plumbing, I think, especially for the critic.
If you tend toward formalism, for instance, then why not strive to explain why the internal mechanisms of the works inform your different experiences of them? Better that than piously importing (likely arbitrary) standards for what constitutes "good writing" from god-knows-where into your evaluation of the works -- in which case in my view you're just enacting someone else's criticism rather than your own. A critical lens, as far as I'm concerned, should seek to describe and to explain and to account for the extraordinary (and sometimes not-so extraordinary) power and the experience of art -- and account for why we value it -- not condition (or distort, or impose upon) it, overly prescriptively.
