RatHat fucked around with this message at 19:21 on Mar 17, 2021

• Itachi's true motivations are actually foreshadowed remarkably well; the way a lot of fans at the time called it a bullshit retcon was pretty silly. Even Sasuke reflects quite early on that Itachi probably kept him alive because he wanted Sasuke to kill him on some level, and then we get the flashback in the Sasuke Retrieval arc with a lot of hints that the growing rift between Itachi and the rest of the Uchiha was connected with some sort of rift between the Uchiha and the rest of Leaf. That said, I can see why it rubbed people the wrong way; while I haven't gotten to this point on the re-read, I remember the other characters viewing Itachi in a little too positive a light for someone who tortured a child into devoting his life to obsessive hatred.
  
• The Rasengan training arc drags a bit, though I can see why Kishimoto thought it was necessary, since it was different enough from the rest of Naruto's jutsu at that point that it made sense to establish him "earning" it. The fight against Orochimaru and Kabuto that follows is cool, though.
  
• Speaking of Orochimaru, it seemed to be pretty heavily implied that he was a pedophile early on; his dialogue with Anko in the Forest of Death in particular is pretty uncomfortable. It feels like the series just sort of dropped this angle, probably wisely.
  
• I think the biggest writing flaw in Part I might be that the time skip just happens too early. The anime, of course, overcompensates for this with filler arcs, but even in the anime, Team 7 doesn't go on very many missions together before Sasuke defects. In a sense an early time skip was necessary to make Sakura less weak, but that's just one writing flaw trying to address another writing flaw; Sakura could have just learned some genjutsu in the one-month gap before the Chunin Exam finals.
  
• The Sasuke Retrieval arc is solid, but not quite on the level of the Chunin Exams. Several of the fights have a somewhat Bleach-like structure to them (whoever uses their full power first loses, basically) that both earlier and later Naruto fights generally avoid using so overtly, but there's some cleverness too.
  
• Both Naruto vs. Sasuke fight and Sasori vs. Sakura and Chiyo go on pretty long, though I think the latter, at least, is cool enough to mostly justify it.