i have read and even enjoyed marine drake interacting with various others (smoker and hina) but i think my preference/headcanon is the marine is such a vast institution it's plausible and offers more opportunities for dramatic irony and intrigue for marines to know each other only by reputation or to yk Not know each other, which is how we get the two-corazon infernal affairs plot. drake's impression of luffy is entirely off koby, not "vice admiral garp's grandson" or even as a fellow supernova. the only thing we know for certain about his career is he worked under borsalino for a while. we know plural vice admirals and tashigi are aware of SWORD, but in how much detail is unclear
and rosinante and bellemere have their parallels and are cute in fanart, but geography matters to me personally (obviously) so in my own writing i put a lot of stock in the insularity/provinciality of the seas, which is why my north blue stuff references tsuru and kujaku, and i've not threaded this needle yet with drake but borsalino and sakazuki (and hibari) are from the north blue too!!
i personally imagine rosinante's life went like mary geoise -> north blue (wherever homing landed with his family) -> grand line (if sengoku's mentorship was that direct) -> back to the north blue, but we can't assume every marine ever ends up in the grand line, not even rosi! bellemere might never have left the east blue. koby and helmeppo might still be there too without garp's intervention
obviously i wrote a whole bildungsroman about hawkins but my working drake timeline is like
whatever marine base diez barrels was stationed at
the barrels pirates / minion island
some n. blue marine base! idk that sengoku would ctrl+v his rosinante thing on another orphan immediately, but this is where i kind of what Love if borsalino was the garp to his koby. do you follow
THEN the grand line and in fact the new world, given drake being at egghead with kizaru two years pre-canon/four years pre-ts
and i just don't think he hauled ass back to the north blue to start the drake pirates, or if he did he blatantly cheated lmao like a marine battleship dropped him off after going through the calm belt
