Quote Originally Posted by Assertn
I can't expect anyone to spend hours fansubbing an episode that I wouldn't spend 24 minutes to watch. Its quite an inopportune time to start fillers, imo.

Oda left some room in the manga to expand on a lot of content, but they have to get at least a little into the canon stuff first, cause obviously you have to know what happens to the strawhats.
I'm not sure if i want the anime messing with that part of the manga

Anyway the opening would seem to indicate that they won't use the cover stories