Kishimoto has a lot of creative ideas, but his execution of said ideas is poor. Also, he fails to stick to a proper message, instead he keeps switching it throughout the story. Not to mention making something like Naruto and Sakura's closeness a red herring is downright incompetent writing. Don't even get me started on the handling of characters such as Sasuke and Obito (heck, even Naruto and Sakura were poorly handled).
In other words, he is a bad writer with good ideas. He needed a good editor/assistant to stop him from losing track.