Part 1 of Naruto is pretty underrated. Shippuden goes to utter garbage, sure...

>Part 1 of Naruto is pretty underrated.
HAHAHA what?
Everyone and their mother fellate the fuck out of part 1

Yeah, the bloodline thing is honestly so fucking overdone at this point. It's become cliche.
The themes I was referring to were more like... how originally the shinobi system was shown to be kinda fucked (iirc this was a part of the Zabuza arc but it's been a while so my memory is hazy) and Naruto promised to reform it or some shit but that never went anywhere. Along with Neji's whole "fate" deal, pretty sure Naruto was leaning hard on the free will side of the spectrum and showing "oh you can change your fate, your live is in your hands", and then in Shippuden it throws the whole "reincarnation and prophecy and destiny" thing at us, absolutely nuking that earlier theme.
And yeah Naruto and Sasuke's "friendship" was trite

Naruto goes to shit the moment the chunin exam starts

I thought that was the general consensus.

Itachi BTFOing Sasuke was pretty memorable too. Plus, Itachi being an utter psycho made much MORE sense than him murdering his entire clan to avoid a relatively minor political conflict. Danzo was retarded as always, but so much for a GeNiUs nInJa, I suppose.

Tbf, Luffy doesn't have any talent and the only 'power' he inherited from them (CoC) has been useless over the course of the story.

>Luffy doesn't have any talent
what? Both Naruto and Ichigo have far more drawbacks on their fucking powers than Luffy has on his.