While it's sad that it's essentially dropped, I have to admit that, IMO, the last parts of the work seemed to have lost their footing and felt incomparable in a lot of ways to the earlier ones.
I don't know about the author, but I, by the end, had no idea neither what's the overarching story now nor what is the work itself about.
Vagabond is a very beautiful and even wonderful work, but it said and showed what it wanted to by its half-point, and after that, it's been just aimless creativity.
Very comparable to Berserk, since that classic title, too, became somewhat lost and strayed far from its roots for no benefit many years before the author's untimely passing.