At the very least the downfall of Sakura into a needy idiot unable to move on gave us one of the best female characters in the franchise.
Looking forward to see how they ruin her!
I'm going to have to agree with you. Sasuke/Sakura is unbelievably stupid in context (Sasuke literally tried to kill you and everyone you care about, Sakura!) but Sarada is awesome. I even like Sasuke being the mentor to Boruto...even thought he's a totally shitty father to Sarada.
Here's the thing: poor shipping writing doesn't exist in a vacuum. Most of the time, the "bad" ship is the result of poor writing all around. There's a lot of really stupid shit Naruto pulled story-wise. Major villains getting forgiven was a running theme, but Jesus Christ, they really just half-forgave Obito after all the horrible shit he did? I thought Ichigo getting together with Orihime in Bleach was sorta disappointing, but holy shit, it's at the bottom of the list of how fucking awful that manga became by the end. That final arc was utter torture.
Basically, I don't get angry because Person A didn't get with Person B. I get annoyed when the writing around it is terrible and hurts the story. I really liked Felicity in Arrow when I saw her in Season 1, but the general consensus among my friends and family seems to be that her relationship with Oliver completely took over the show in Season 4 and made it objectively worse.
If a ship is odd when you think about it (the time/age-difference-but-not-really? weirdness involved with Jack & Ashi and Trunks & Mai, for example), but it works well with everything else, I'm OK with it. If it's fucking crazy and completely alters a story's themes and people's interpretations of it like with Usagi Drop, then it can retroactively ruin the story. But Usagi Drop is really the only example I can think of because it's so extreme and disgusting. Without that ending, it's a nice little story about an adoptive father raising a child. With it, all of its goodwill and charm is darkened by a cloud of possible pandering to an otaku audience and gross story decisions. It's not that it happens at all; it's that the story treats it as something relatively normal and romantic by the end.
That being said, you can not like or be disappointed in something without it completely torpedoing everything you liked about that show. You also shouldn't place hope into something happening in a story and then be angry when it doesn't happen. That even goes beyond shipping. I see it all the time among Steven Universe fans who get mad that their theories either get shot down or that a story/episode doesn't go the way they wanted to.
