Well, aren´t you nice, Archangel :/

@topic:

I found viperwasp´s posting makes an interesting point: Basically, at what point did Kishimoto decide to change the scale of ninja battles in the Naruto-series. Personally, I think he wrote himself into a corner when he hyped Pain as the "undefeated" uber member of Akatski. Prior to that, we got to witness Shikamaru beating Hidan in a 100% ninja-like way, and even Kakuzu took a whole group of main characters and a silly "shit, I underestimated this boy"-scene to be killed.
And then came Sage mode Naruto.
There simply wasn´t a chance to go back from there. You´d either have this manga be a complete one-man-show from there, or give other people new powers, even at the cost of plot consistency and inner believability.
Well, and then power levels and power balance got screwed over completely. We got all these legendary resurrected ninjas that even the new all-powerful Kyuubi cloak Naruto had troubles with. While Naruto was nerfed yet again, his comrades got upgrades to keep up with these monsters.
To conclude, I´d agree that Orochimaru´s Edo Tensei was never supposed to be some kind of gimped Edo Tensei. It was the real thing, and why not? It was impressive and creepy, befitting of a villain. Tbh, I´m still waiting for a proper explanation of Kabuto´s Edo Tensei´s mechanics. It just doesn´t make sense that this jutsu will continue even after his death, and it also doesn´t make sense how Kabuto could muster all the chakra for the revival of so many ninjas. There has to be some kind of trick to it. I definitely would prefer if Kabuto somehow linked the Juubi´s chakra to his Edo Tensei, thus making it infinte. Would be better than some "well duh"-explanation.

@OP:

I didn´t even mind Haki being reconned so much as it being completely out of line with the whole series´ setup. You have this awesome concept of devil fruits that grant all kinds of crazy powers, and then, 10000 years into the manga, you think it´s necessary to introduce, well duh, magic? It was silly, plain as that.