That's the worst thing you can do is drop your fic work just because Kishimoto screwed up his. Too bad that the author's chosen to go that route.
Personally, I have no use for much of anything after the Pain arc. It's scattered, with confused motivations and end goals, where even the final villain(s) ended up a muddled mess. There are a few moments that are usable in some fic stories (Sakura's confession, Sasuke's attack on Danzo and Karin), but for the most part it's a mess.
Pre-Pain, the Akatsuki, the goal of getting the jinchurikis, Naruto and Sakura's relationship, Sasuke out of the village with an unknown motivation — all of that really holds together.
As a writer, if it weren't for the per-Pain story, if we only had post-Pain and the war arc, I wouldn't be writing fics for Naruto. I probably wouldn't even be interested in it.
Yeah, and one of the reasons, I think, is that Part 1 was much more simple and straightforward, but enough to get the messages across. When Part 2 tried to make things "deep" and "complex" and crap with various things, that's when it quickly went downhill and culminating in completely contradicting the very lessons taught in Part 1.
Anyway, I read a few reviews to the statement and one left me thinking. The reviewer commented about how everything in Gaiden (and really, the war arc) revolves around the Sharingan and whatever weird mythology or history Kishi wants to create thanks to stupid crap the Uchiha can do. The reviewer references the good old days when the manga was about cherishing friendship, struggling to persevere when the odds were stacked against you, and trying to find good in an evil and violent world.
And isn't that the truth? I sometimes wonder what happened to cause such a drastic shift in the tone of Naruto. It's really kinda sad. I have such affection for Part I.
It is true.
Even after the Rinnegan was introduced with Nagato, and the talk about its legendary power, being the most powerful doujutsu, and so on, it was the Sharingan (and the Uchiha Clan) that just kept getting more and more powers and "development" while we got pretty much nothing about the Rinnegan or Hagaromo and whatnot until the very end really.
All Obito did with the one Rinnegan he took from Nagato's corpse was a poor man's Six Path's, but otherwise didn't do anything new or original with it. If anything, he had LESS than what Nagato showed given all the Edo Tensei Jinchuriki seemed to have was the "shared sight" between them, not even any of the individual Rinnegan moves Nagato demonstrated with his Six Paths.
Even when Madara was using it, aside from the meteor summoning, all he showed was a "perfected"/"stabilized" Susano'o, a move that is, in general, far more associated with the (Eternal) Mangekyo Sharingan, but otherwise, nothing new or original to show more of what the Rinnegan was truly capable of given they were his eyes originally and not Nagato's, and given the infinite chakra of Edo Tensei at the time, you'd think, like Kaguya, he would be pulling more powerful and unique moves aside from the ones we saw Nagato use via the Six Paths. Again, it felt more like we had overall less with Madara's use than we did with Nagato.
And the same goes for Sasuke.
Of course, all of that was just thrown away in The Last, much like everything else, all for the asspulled "Tenseigan":.