... I don't think it's the year off that did it. It's the year off + massive coaching change + commitment to a huge number of projects that did it, imo.
I don't think the coaching change or her commitment to other projects had any significant influence in her preparation for Worlds. Out of fairness, I don't think she did bad, to begin with. She almost won, and it's not like we've never seen her skate worse before, even with the Yu-Na of the past including her Olympic season.
It was evident during the run-throughs and warm-ups that she was competition ready. She had retained her jumps and all, and it seemed to me she was even better conditioned than ever. Yu-Na herself said after the competition that it was not as difficult as she'd thought to get her condition back to the Olympic level, and that she felt she's getting physically stronger after each season.
About the coaching change, how much room can a coach have for improvement when he inherits someone like Yu-Na? It'd be like you were asked to become Woods' new swing coach after he regularly obliterated the scoring records and blew away the field by ten strokes. Given the post-Olympic letdown and the turmoil around the coaching change, I think Oppegard did an excellent job in keeping her focused and motivated enough to get her back to that competitive level.
About her commitments to other activities, since her ice shows in LA early October last year, she had no official or commercial activities, other than making a speech at AIPS Congress in late March. She gave up making the trip for Sport Accord in London and concentrated on Worlds. She had six months for preparation, which I think would've been enough. As usual she had a tremendous amount of risk-taking embedded in her programs, e.g., difficult transitions, the FSSpin immediately following the second 3Lz without any steps, the 2A only 2-3 seconds apart from the 3S at the symbals toward the end of her LP, etc. Of course, she had some bobbles with the jumps, but it can happen to anybody anytime, and I think overall she executed the difficult routines superbly, which indicated she had been ready. When she said she had no regrets as she did everything she could and was satisfied with the result, I believed it.
Did her skipping the whole season and coming directly to Worlds have any impact on her performance? I would say probably, considering that the botched 3-3 in the SP was her first ever in the event, counting back to her two Junior Worlds appearances. True, it's uncertain she'd have done better, had she had a preparatory event. But it seems commonsense that no amount of run-throughs or image training could substitute a real thing in getting rid of certain jitters and fine-tuning the programs. Yu-Na herself in a way acknowledged this, by hinting that she would consider going to one event before Worlds, if she continue competing next season.
I remember this pic. Mira's also in the there. 
) but a realistic scenario. She is true to what she says. She has never said she generally enjoys competing but it seems that she is trying her best to do. Though she has not confirmed anything, she will possibly skip GP and will go to 4CC and Worlds next season. 
