Yeah, this was actually pretty good. I almost got emotional over the deceiving stuff and Whitebeard forgiving one of his "sons" stabbing him. lol

Although I guess Oda wanted to use it to add awesomeness to the scene of Whitebeard giving his "family" the option to run (which they obviously wont do), the old man could've archived alot by just using his power way earlier to do something other than just breaking ice walls or generating a tsunami (maybe something that isn't water so Aokiji can freeze it?). I mean, I'm not saying you can save everyone when going into war, but with his powers I doubt he couldn't at least be some kind of advantage to his followers (and he can be pretty accurate with his devil fruit power as we've seen)... instead he was just standing there for like 20 episodes doing very little. Same thing goes for the admirals.
I assume that this is some kind of reference from Oda to real wars where the heads usually just give out orders, but that's because they can do at only that, while Whitebeard is said to be the strongest guy in the world. And from what we've seen, he could've probably wiped out all the small fry at the beginning to avoid a huge pack of causalities on his side.
But well, I'm probably asking for too much here. It's not like that makes it bad, but it at least makes the episode lose some credibility.

Still much better than the episodes with Hancock having mutliple orgasms over being touched by Luffy (or just thinking about him) and all of those rather boring random fights that didn't really archive anything.