This story has been a very long ride and it has had its ups and downs. I had to put the rating somewhere in the middle because of that. The story generally starts out pretty good and the characters, while a tad bit bland, had a lot of interesting concepts and had the potential to grow and become more, which was even sort of the point of the story.
Somewhere between a third and halfway through the story, it started going down. Far down.
Somewhere between halfway and two-thirds of the way through the story, it genuinely seemed like the author was just making things up as he went along. Every new plot twist and revelation felt worse than the last and every one of them felt like the writing was dropping off a cliff in terms of quality.
Somewhere very quickly into the story, those lessons about functioning as a team and leaning how to be a ninja stopped mattering, because now everybody was just generic shounen fighting characters that you could see in most any story of the genre.

But where the story really seemed to come off the rails was in relation to Sasuke and his family. Their entire existence seemed like an enormous anchor that did nothing but drag the story down and force everybody to talk about how amazing they are/were no matter what they've done, without giving the audience any reason to actually think they are. I'm not even exaggerating when I say that their constant influence ended up ruining the story in the second half, because it seemed like nothing mattered unless they were involved.

I loved the story toward the beginning, and it was sad to see how far it sank after that, but I still can't give this manga too terrible a rating based on that early run.