That's possible though it don't explain the other characters, including Sai.
Like someone said, Sai's just a side character. I think he gave up and stop caring after 2010.
I kind of agree. where were the fans when sakura faced opposition that i am reading she had ... if i could have i would have been more supportive of her but i assumed the fanbase would act and i don't get why no one did. it seems like all this fanbase does is blame sp for what they think is bad animation but my instinct would be to monitor the manga and the writing because if that falls then good animation won't bring it back
I'm started shipping NS because of the Sakura hate and I never learned about all this until a year later. I heard from people hear that there was a video with Kishi going ballistic about the Sakura hate. I'm not sure if that's true lol. So I ask, what were the JP NS fans were doing doing all this backlash towards haters all because of the Pain Arc?
The hate just existed because Kishi couldnt develop her character properly
So its mostly his fault to begin with
Alo, you can put Yahagi in the same boat too. This is one of his two biggest mistakes. The reason why Sakura couldn't develop properly because Yahagi suggests that Kishi should focus more on Sasuke's character to bring in more fans. Most of Sasuke's screen time in PT 2 strip Sakura of any screen time and very importance to the story. She should have been the one to eradicate half the Akatsuki faction and be well known for that. When she got shafted to the sideline for far too long, Hinata's fandom and the pairing they chose for her started to get popular and that was when you have the editor's, meddling in Kishi's work to give Sakura a proper ending, according to those rumors.
Kishi thought that Sakura's beauty Japanese fan were furious and could not understand where Kishi was getting his info from. He pointing out a poll where Hinata was ranked higher than Sakura and is the reason why he mad an heroine switch due to popularity. The Japanese claimed that polls never existed and they posted all the recent character polls on 2chan with Sakura ranked higher than Hinata. And they made a remark that Kishi has brain disease and has no idea what he's talking about. They even spam this on the assistant's twitter the reason why Sakura is being hated because he failed to make Sakura get over Sasuke.
When I listened to that Kobayashi interview even Kishi said that little girls came up to him saying how much they hate Sakura. It's like, WTF JP NS fandom have been doing all this time when the anti were making their voiced known 
