Exactly. To compare Hinata to Sakura, take each one out of the plot and see how much it changes.
With Hinata gone, very very very little changes. Some plot points don't happen the same, but the major arcs stay the same.
With Sakura gone, everything changes. Literally everything. Naruto does not set his sights on her, he doesn't work to impress her, he doesn't flip out to save her. And this is just in the first story arc. You couldn't have Naruto, the manga, without Sakura.
The only people who think Hinata is important are her fans. But she's not, she barely makes a difference in the hero's life. It's a fact.
Even Neji's story wouldn't change much as the target for his anger at the Main House can simply be moved to Hanabi. Hinatatas is simply the moeblob trope that fans are supposed to want to protect from mean ole Neji. She's literally nothing but a fetish trope in the long run; a trope who, for some reason, is involved in a career she really has NO business being in in the first place with such a "personality". It's why it makes far more sense that she was initially envisioned as a civilian girl. I personally get really annoyed when an anime/manga/etc. do such a thing.
At least Desmond Doss (Hacksaw Ridge) aimed for a specific role in the military that allowed him to carry out his pacifist beliefs (combat medic), but if he was Hinatatas, he would have ended up trying to be a machine gunner or something in spite of us being shown the backstory of why he refuses to carry a gun and such.
True she was annoying at the beginning but everybody could see her character building so it was bearable to me because I was seeing the final product, and man it was pretty nice until Kishi screwed with it.
Similar to Naruto, Sakura was clearly purposely started at a lower point, like an underdog variant, in order to make her development much more noticeable, which it was in part two until, yeah, Kishi and SP screwed it over.
I think her hatred was also because of the writing....
In part 1, she was contrasted with Hinata, the pretty/shy/sympathetic girl. She was shown as falling for Sasuke, then crying to Naruto who then made the promise of a lifetime.
She got a bump in Part 2, when her character evolved, she supported Naruto and came into her own.
But in Part 3, the post-Pain arc, her whole story just goes flat. She gets no more positive story line, and the comparison with sweet Hinata reaches full throttle. Sakura's is never redeemed.
I think there are personal reasons people didn't like her — the tsundere trope being one of them — but ultimately, the story didn't support her. (Or Naruto, for that matter.) I just keep going back to that.
If they'd written her as powerful, devoted to Naruto, with a story arc like an enemy that she has to battle on-and-off through the last arc, with it finally culminating in a battlefield showdown — then there would be more people who cared about Sakura. Who still rooted for her. But the story made her irrelevant. So the fans who disliked her did too.
And as I keep saying, I'm willing to bet that a majority of people who claim to hate Sakura because of her actions driven by the tsundere trope absolutely LOVE other pairings whose female is tsundere and have done similar, if not "worse" things to the male, like Louise in Zero no Tsukaima. If you want actual abuse, just look at her.
Yes, that is why we were cheering them both on because they made each other better. Honestly that is how a relationship should work and not about obsession. Yes, Sakura had a really bad obsession over Sasuke but when you think about it, Hinata had it just as bad or if not worse because it turned into stalking, which is a crime might I add. To me she is worse than Sakura in that department.
What makes it worse is that she must have seen the looks and vial things done to him over the years but she didn't lift a finger to help him.
That's also something I continuously point out and that NH extremists vehemently try to deny. The ONLY difference between Sakura's crush on Sasuke and Hinatatas' crush on Naruto was how they displayed it - Sakura was loud and up front about hers (constantly asking Sasuke out) while Hinatatas was silent and stalking. Neither one truly knew a thing about their respective crushes besides what they managed to see on the surface, much less "understood" them.
Otherwise, Sakura was actually growing OUT of her childish and obsessive crush on Sasuke, seeing him for how he truly was as well as Naruto, causing her to gravitate towards Naruto and away from Sasuke, while Hinatatas remained the same at best or even had gotten WORSE with hers (especially with her self-admitted selfish confession); still only seeing Naruto as the version she mentally conjured for herself rather than Naruto for who he truly was, still knowing nothing about him (not even the fact that ramen was his favorite food), much less "understanding" his pain, ideals, reasons for not giving up, why he wanted acknowledgement and to be Hokage, etc.
