I just want to throw this out there. Many of you may recall "Road To Ninja: Naruto the Movie".
Do you think that this movie was perhaps an attempt to do what they couldn't do in canon? I don't know who was really responsible for the build up of Naruto and Sakura's relationship. It may have been Kishimoto's idea, or one of the editor's ideas, or maybe it was an accident. Regardless of whose idea it was, the manga showed us Naruto and Sakura's relationship developing into love and slowly into romance. It was never fully realized of course, and we got NaruHina in the end, but that doesn't change what led up to that.
Road to Ninja seems like a glimpse into what could have been. For me personally, I view this film as a writer's desperation to show what they really wanted, but couldn't make happen. There are so many details in this movie that indicate to me that the canon manga was a mix of 2 different people influencing the story. Someone at Jump wanted Road to Ninja, and someone else wanted The Last. Whoever wanted The Last seems to have been given complete control of the manga in its final chapters and that sudden change of direction is what made the ending of the manga feel so wrong. I think the reason it felt like the ending to a different story is because it was someone else making the decisions at that point.
I don't know if these thoughts are old news but I figured it wouldn't hurt to ask. If anyone happens to know if there disagreements between Kishimoto and his Editors or Jump executives then I'd be interested to know.