I view all of these post-mortem as nothing but casualties caused by business decision errors.
Kishimoto can say whatever he wants after the fact. That won't change what has been written in his manga. The more he speak, the more we know there's hardly any planning, and there's nothing philosophically deeper in the content than what was drawn. The readers thought too much about it, lol... For me personally, the more I realized that I gave too much credits to him and how much I overrated him. I'm not sure if he's being humble, but again, I should've realized long time ago that Kishi is no Arakawa. When he said he cannot write romance, that was to be taken as it is, literally.
God knows what is his actual motive with the interviews, though I reckon these interviews as nothing but attempts to seek attention. We all know that the latest volume of Boruto sold under 100k in its first week, albeit heavy advertising and all. As a benchmark, Naruto manga sold in the scale of ~2 million in its first week during its heyday. In 15 years of its original run, it has sold 220 million. That's quite a feat. You'll notice that a lot of Naruto apologists keep saying that it's in top 10 blabla, it's still profitable, blabla.... yeah right.... the one reason it's falling behind other series is the arrogance of the current producer that think about it as big.
Looking at the trends, it's steadily declining --which is not surprising. We predicted this since November 2014 (judging how the last volume and the gaiden's reception on the market). It won't get cancelled for sure, but based on the trends, I'm quite sure it won't be as successful as it was before the ending. Kishi knows this. Hence, I'd think that's the reason he opt not to continue authoring Naruto. No point beating the dead horse.
Whether the decision to end Naruto as per current plot was triggered by greed or by favorability (i.e. false assumption NH/SS contributes more financially), Kishi/SP/WSJ cannot undo what has been done: NS fans and the fans that read the manga based on a good story telling quality have moved on.
Will putting back Kishimoto as the author fix the situation? Who knows, but I doubt so. His new manga hasn't launched yet right? I guess there's contractual obligation that he cannot just wash his hands off Boruto manga... People who read Naruto more or less knows what his authoring skills like, which is revealed largely at the end of the series.
Another problem is the plot itself: there's nothing to look forward to and the characters are hardly relatable.
Have a look at Charlie Brown in Peanuts (yup, I'm talking about the comic strip --I'm that old. haha...). Quoting from a recent article that I read "Part of the appeal of Peanuts is its nuanced view of the human psyche. Although the series is ostensibly for children, the concerns it addresses, from loneliness to fear of failure, apply to people of all ages. Although it can be demoralising to read about Charlie’s repeated lack of success, in his love life and on the playing field, it made the strip relatable to a wide audience. “Charlie must be the one who suffers”, said Schulz “because he is a caricature of the average person. Most of us are much more acquainted with losing than winning.”
You can relate to Charlie easily. The author knows and designs him as such. We are much more acquainted with losing.
Same as Naruto in its early days. Naruto was a loser and we can relate to him and to his struggle. He had a one sided crush to Sakura chan; --that too, we can relate to him. What made Naruto interesting was his effort to keep up-skilling and training, to keep doing his best to win his crush's heart. We yearn for his success because we know, deep down, we are also familiar with such situation. In one way or another... Missing that chance, losing that match, failing that test, having a crush to that person that we're afraid of approaching. We are familiar with this, hence we can relate to it, although on the surface it's primarily action manga in ninja world with a lot of Japanese Edo period (Tokugawa) references and Japanese folklore. The emotional bits of it --the struggle, the one sided love, the friendship; has made this manga took off to where it was.
With Boruto, you have a kid that's "talented", born into a wealthy family, his mother is a princess, his father is the #1 person in your village, he has a lot of fans at school. A main character whose acting up just because daddy isn't around and busy at work. What a boring setup for a character in a manga that emphasizes about struggle. The setup is the exact opposite of Naruto, yet, the storyline is copying the older generation. That, my dear NS friends, is a recipe for a disaster. How many people can relate to his character? Not much I suppose... and NH/SS fandom that was supposed to be 'big' turns out only support it in a scale of a fraction of NS.
Such a waste of potential.
