I feel that Shokugeki no Souma could have been so much more.

I do feel like the art was always extremely strong, and only got better, and I do respect Saeki Shun as a result of that, and I don't mean to bash his partner writer in any way, but I do feel like the story was suffering the problem of getting too samey, with the same story structure being used over and over with only just enough difference to keep dedicated readers from dropping it.

I think that there's a possibility that the very concept and structure of the shokugeki is the main problem here. The shokugeki replaces the battle in a traditional shonen battle manga, but it has certain rules and a structure (also owing to the fact that they're cooking, and the cooking itself is all real world techniques) that make it not just unclear who is winning at any one point (meaning there's no ebb and flow to the "battle"), but also make it so that it's 90% certain who is going to win as soon as they finish cooking and decide who is going to get their food judged first. It used to be of the opinion that the best current shonen battle manga was Shokugeki, but it's pretty clear at this point that the shokugeki lacks a lot of the features that a real fight has.

It's also just overusage of the tournament arc. Normally, an infrequent tournament arc is a good way to instantly generate hype but when every single arc ends in a tournament and a final showdown, and every battle inside said tournament is a shokugeki, that's a lot of extra rigidity that makes the story feel repetitive.

Despite all that, I think that it was good for a very long time, actually, but it did feel like all the structural problems were wearing it down by the last arc. You shouldn't be reading Shokugeki no Souma, and be thinking to yourself, "oh, not another shokugeki"