Frozen peppers are fine, they're mostly water anyway so the texture barely changes once they hit a hot pan. The real problem is the broccoli, that stuff goes soft and sad if you so much as look at it wrong. What I do is dump the frozen stuff straight into a screaming hot wok and don't touch it for a bit, let the water cook off instead of steaming everything. You also gotta add the fresh aromatics like garlic and ginger at the end so you still get that real stir fry smell. Honestly the frozen mix works better as a base than as the whole thing, toss in some fresh onion or snap peas with it and nobody at the table knows the difference. The math wins, I just stopped expecting it to taste like the market run version.

Did you ever watch a show where the "boring" parts hit way harder the second time? That happened to me with the Davy Back Fight arc, which everyone hates on and says to skip. First watch I was just waiting for it to end so we could get to the good stuff. Then on a rewatch years later I noticed how much it shows Luffy being a real captain and trusting his crew even when the games are dumb and rigged. It also makes the later stuff with Foxy feel less like a waste and more like a breather before things get heavy. Same deal as what you're saying about Little Chiquita, sometimes the chill arcs are doing quiet work the whole time.