Not to be rude here but Team Taka in general aren't very popular in JP and world wide. Kishi's editor was the one who created Taka in the first place because they couldn't leave Sasuke solo on his mission. That should tell you enough that there characters were not going to be important in the manga. Kishi also never "created" Taka so that should also tell you that he was never serious with Taka.
An unpopular group with creators who also didn't care for them either/ were only introduced for Sasuke's plot: of course they will get the short end of the stick.
The one thing most complained about was that they could have had potential to be well liked. But like everything else, people prefer the old vs. new. Sai and Yamato was hated and became unpopular for the same reasons as Taka: they replaced Team 7. Maybe if people were more open minded with potential outside of Team 7, Taka would probably had a bigger plot?
Taka did had plenty of fans, thing is they where not very vocal about it. Besides kishi never showed them off so what did you expect.
It's like if you want to sell a new car but never show it off, just go and say "it has this functions" but never takes you out for a ride nor shows you a trailer commercial about it.
Yahagi sensei made Kishimoto create them and "yes they worked" Then again these characters came out of the same mind that made Naruto into the smash hit success that it used to be. Once he left look at the trainwreck that we got. So that makes you wonder and reconsider your stance upon them.
Plenty of other background characters got more fleshed out, these guys just got abandoned and Sugetsu got royaly screwed. And yes he had all the basics of a shounen hero - in this case anti-hero - and even shared the same theme with the manga "new gen surpasses the old one" which was abandoned in favor of child of prophecy and world wide peace shenanigans.
