Some points regarding Luffy's role among the Straw Hats, the way he inspires people and him being portrayed as "weak" by OPLA. I've seen a good amount of anime/manga watchers/readers complain about Luffy's portrayal in S2 and that he's too weak in terms of strength and fighting skills to make the crew's confidence and belief in him feel justified and believable. As an OPLA only watcher, I want to get into why the way OPLA portrays Luffy isn't a problem in its own context. I don't want to argue if they changed anything about Luffy or not because I can't judge that. I only say that he works the way OPLA is portraying him.
First, some points in favour of "nerfing" OPLA Luffy in comparison to his anime/manga counterpart:
It gives the other members of the crew more time to shine.
I've often seen people argue that it's completely fine that Luffy (or, more broadly, the monster trio) are by far the strongest fighters in the crew because the other characters have other skills that make them equally useful and indispensable. In theory, a group of characters having all kinds of different skills which makes all of them important in their own way is completely fine, ideal even, but it really depends on what the story considers narratively important. How many major, arc defining conflicts in OP are solved by not punching the bad guy in the face? The only one so far, as far as the LA goes, is the Reverse Mountain and Laboon situation, the former of which majorly depended on Nami's navigation skills (win! But even then it was only possible because of Luffy's specific strength) and the latter of which Luffy managed to solve anyway (and was originally about fighting in the manga). There are, of course, moments and scenes where other skillsets and the respective characters are relevant but the narrative importance, the meat of the story, lies in the fights and physical feats. Therefore, any character who doesn't contribute in the fighting automatically contributes much less to the story as a whole than any character who does. It's not as extreme in the LA because the screentime the fights take up is greatly reduced but it's still there because the nature of the conflicts (with few exceptions) doesn't change. If this were e.g. a heist series where the major conflict resolution is not only achieved by fighting, I could believe that other skills are just as important and relevant, but that's not where the story puts its focus. To give a concrete example of what I mean: Nami predicting a storm before arriving at Drum Island VS Luffy scaling a mountain – both actions arguably save the entire crew/situation at hand, but which of the two gets significantly more page/screentime and is, therefore, considered the much more narratively important achievement?
It removes the need for Luffy to be constantly incapacitated in the early arcs just so the conflicts can have some tension.
Early OP often has Luffy and Co. face villains that are way beneath Luffy's level. To still have some tension in these conflicts Luffy is often artificially removed from the action because having him there would solve the problem too easily. „Artifically“ in this case is not only about any given individual situation but how constructed the entire plot sequence feels. (Does it flow naturally or is it noticable that the author is deliberately constructing things this way to make specific scenes happen?) Avoiding having to run into this situation, i.e. always having to find a way for Luffy to be otherwise occupied, from the get-go by putting Luffy closer to the level of the other characters is already better writing in a series in which physical battles are the main method for dealing with conflicts.
It makes the villains more threatening and avoids turning them, or the average person, into pathetic jokes.
Early OP has a lot of „technically“ threatening villains (i.e. threatening for a normal person) that Luffy and Co. can deal with like jokes. E.g. Wapol and most of the Baroque Works agents fall into this category (a technically super-scary assassin group but Luffy and Co. one-hit pretty much all of them except the absolute strongest of the strong). Personal preference maybe, but I just prefer the protagonists, in the context of the story, to be closer to your average (very strong) human than absolute freaks of nature. If Wapol is so terrifying to Drum Island's entire population that none of them can even hope to deal with him but Luffy and Co. treat him like a pesky fly, that doesn't make me go „oh wow, Luffy is so strong!“ but „oh wow, everyone else in this world is pathetic and can't do shit!“ I don't want the power gap to be this ridiculously vast, personally, which would also raise a lot of questions about how this even works, like why are some people like Sanji randomly on this level but others aren't? This fix, yet again, also provides more tension to the story and gives the protagonists more challenges that are actually challenging for them to overcome.
It makes the fights more strategic.
Luffy can't just overpower every enemy with pure strength alone. He needs to fight in clever ways which is a lot more interesting to watch than two guys just mindlessly hitting each other. I also like the teamups of our main group for different fights, it gives even more opportunities for different strategies and teamwork. Not for every single fight, of course, but for e.g. Wapol it would've felt completely stupid for Vivi not to get involved and help as she wasn't busy doing anything else and Wapol is a far more personally relevant antagonist to her than he is to Luffy.
With that out of the way,
How is OPLA Luffy inspiring?
when he isn't by far the strongest fighter and can't curbstomp pretty much any villain the Straw Hats have come across at this point?
Maybe not having the original context from the anime/manga helps in seeing what OPLA does more clearly and on its own merits. In the context of OPLA, I never got the sense that Luffy was supposed to be this absolutely unstoppable force or this massive ray of hope who is definitely going to save the world at this point. He primarily inspires his own crew who want to follow their dreams alongside him and causes enough of a stir with the people he comes into contact with to remind them of Gold Roger and be afraid of/interested in what he might end up becoming. (Even in the manga Smoker beats Luffy soundly yet he still fears him becoming the next Gold Roger. That's not about his physical strength.) The Straw Hats are good people who help when they come across situations where they can help but they didn't set out to save the world, they set out to achieve their own dreams.
In OPLA, Luffy doesn't inspire Zoro, Nami, Usopp and Sanji by being the toughest fighter around, but by how hard he believes in his dream, how he doesn't give up no matter what others try to tell him and how far he's willing to go for it and for those he cares about. (That's arguably what the Garp fight at the end of S1 is meant to hammer home, Luffy can't physically beat him but he still won't be deterred or stop believing that he can achieve his dream.) Zoro, Nami, Sanji and Usopp all have moments where they witness these traits of Luffy in different contexts and that's why I find it very easily understandable why they believe in him so much and depend on him. Sure, he needs a certain strength to back up this determination but nothing in OPLA so far has led me to believe that Luffy doesn't have the strength to pull through in the end because, so far, he always has. Maybe he won't physically punch his way through in every situation but he will find another way to get through somehow (e.g. the Laboon situation, he couldn't physically fight or beat the whale but he still „won“ in the end, i.e. he got his crew out). So why shouldn't his crew members believe the same? Like Zoro and Nami assuring Vivi that Luffy would come through for them in E5 isn't because they know he can punch stuff the hardest but because they're so confident that Luffy would move heaven and earth to save his friends no matter what he's up against.
(Some more notes on the Little Garden situation specifically, Zoro and Nami don't even know how physically strong Miss Goldenweek is so they have no reason to believe that she would be physically stronger than Luffy. They know her weapons are psychological so knowing Luffy's indomitable spirit is even more reason why he should be able to fight through and beat her. Physical strength doesn't help him at all in this situation. Same situation with Mr. 3 and the wax cake, Mr. 3 himself is very fragile and Usopp breaks the wax cake without any physical strength on his part either which Luffy is fully confident that he will manage.)
Luffy doesn't explicitly need the highest physical/fighting strength to back up how inspiring he's supposed to be in OPLA. On the contrary, I find it much more meaningful if fighting isn't literally the only thing Luffy is good at or the primary reason the others rely on him for. (Which also wouldn't justify him being the captain in this case because a captain needs to do much more than just punch people. It's arguably the reason why Zoro isn't the captain despite his fighting prowess, though his subplot in S2E6-8 does a great job of establishing why he's the first mate, i.e. takes over command in a crisis when Luffy isn't there.) It's more that he gives them hope, makes them believe and shows them a way forward when they think that there isn't any.
OPLA portrays the trust and confidence the crew has in Luffy very well and I have absolutely no criticisms or issues with it. I find it 100% believable and convincing. And that's even with that little stumble he takes in S1E6 when Nami left and he thinks Zoro is dying and he doubts his leader abilities and thinks the crew is breaking apart, and it's Zoro waking up and assuring him that the crew isn't falling apart that gets Luffy back on track. I find Zoro's perspective here especially interesting, no idea if this dialogue is in the anime/manga, but in S1E2 he gets asked why he believes in someone like Luffy. And Zoro answers that he doesn't but that that doesn't matter because Luffy believes so hard in himself and that rubs off on you. So even before Zoro started actively believing in Luffy in S1E6 Luffy still inspired him by believing so hard in his dream that Zoro couldn't help but believe more in his own dream, too. Imo it's much more inspiring for yourself to see someone struggling and still never wavering in their belief. It's easy to „believe in yourself“ if you curbstomp everything and nothing ever challenges you. But being challenged repeatedly and persevering through. Every. Single. Time? That's inspiring! The way I've seen him described, anime/manga Luffy feels more like someone the rest of the crew attaches themselves to, along for the ride kinda way, because he's obviously going to do great things and you want to be there with him. In OPLA, it feels more like a group effort, like he's the one who makes you believe that anything is possible, that your dreams can become a reality, because that's his approach to any given problem, but it still takes all of your efforts to actually get there. Honestly, the more I talk about this, the more I understand why Luffy is by far my mother's favourite character in OPLA. (She's seen and knows nothing of the anime/manga.) He's still too much „typical shonen protagonist“ for me to like him as much as I do e.g. Zoro or Nami but heck, I do appreciate him. I really do.
Does that change OPLA Luffy from his anime/manga counterpart? Yeah, apparently. But it also fixes some writing issues and makes his character and his dynamic with the others more interesting to me so I like it. And it works really well in the context of OPLA.
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