Either Kishimoto is lying or he's a complete idiot. But what can be drawn from this, either way, is that Kishimoto ACKNOWLEDGED that there was a lot of NaruSaku development, and therefore inadvertently validated our ship. IF he developed NaruSaku simply for a red herring device, then there are not words in the English language to describe how incredibly STUPID and messed up that is. It's gotten to the point where I'm literally looking up 'stupid' in the thesaurus to figure out if there's a better word to describe this situation, and none of them even come CLOSE to encompassing the breadth of the concept that I wish I could describe to you. Want to know some of the problems with him developing NaruSaku as a red herring?
1) As stated above, it's just MESSED UP, and if there's ONE group of people you should not treat like that, it's your fans who give you your MONEY and trust you to treat your characters well!
2) One of Naruto's defining characteristics (his love for Sakura), which has been there for FIFTEEN FRICKIN YEARS, is apparently irrelevant, and supposedly has been irrelevant from the very beginning of the story.
3) That's NOT the kind of thing you do to 'mislead.' You do NOT mess with people and their ships! You can have a plot twist and make someone evil, you can kill someone, you can make something not what it seems, but you do NOT put in tons of romantic development to mislead an entire fandom. Wanna know why? You do that, and you get this - a huge fandom that hates you. If you weren't gonna make NaruSaku happen, then don't hint at it, and we wouldn't hate you right now. And now, my biggest problem:
4) He didn't develop NaruHina at ALL, so we had no reason to think that NaruSaku was a mislead in the first place because there was nothing that it was misleading FROM!
That last point, man, it's just what pisses me off the most. So he spends all this time developing NaruSaku to 'mislead us' so that NaruHina will come as 'surprise' at the end because 'twists make good story.' 
Um, no. Relationships DEVELOP. You can't just twist some crap relationship into reality because you want to surprise people. It needs development or else it's unrealistic. I just feel like everybody was shafted. Us as NaruSaku were shafted because all of or development was invalidated, and NaruHina fans were shafter because none of the moments that build their relationship even makes sense. They needed a MOVIE to develop their relationship, and in that movie they invent fake flashbacks (which, by the way, contradict the canon manga storyline) to develop their relationship further. Um, excuse me, but if they had some kind of relationship as kids, then why did Naruto never make ONE mention of it during 700 chapters? Oh, that's right, because that backstory didn't exist back then, because NaruHina either wasn't planned, or wasn't developed. It sucks for NaruHina fans because honestly, all of the development of their ship never existed within the story. So, that's what makes me the most angry about this. NaruSaku was a mislead from NaruHina, but NaruHina only exists outside of the story, so in all honesty, NaruSaku wasn't a mislead. It was developed just so that in the end, nothing would come of it, because Kishi's a jackass. 
