Hope?

[DarthEnderX]

And I do realize it's too late now to start a big filler arc. I'm just saying they should have done it in the beginning. All this Naruto-hate is the result of what's not working right now, and that's the small filler arcs they've been mass producing.

Well said. It's too late to fix it now because they've already been fucking it up for over a year.

I think they're best bet for a long arc would actually have been the Mizuki arc. The idea of a bunch of criminals breaking out of a ninja prison is solid. And you could have different teams going after different criminals. Some even chasing them into other countries or not even being tracked down till months later after they're in the middle of some evil plot.

[Kraco]

Technically speaking a longer arc would be far easier to make fine than a short one. A short arc of few episodes just don't allow great many things that make a story good, like developed characters and places or an intriguing plot that is not evident right from the beginning.

I wrote a long ago in some thread that a restricted, long filler plot including only a select and somewhat small group of genins from Konoha sent to some other place for some solid reason could have been the best. If the filler story was dozens of episodes long, they could have then introduced novel characters slowly and intelligently, and they would have become likable (or really hated as villains), and thus relevant. And most of all, anything could have happened to these new characters. And if the number of old Konoha people was limited, then not all the focus would be on them, and the new characters wouldn't be marginalized.

But now the situation has been totally static, as long as it matters, because all familiar people are Konoha ninja, and nothing can happen to them in fillers. Honestly the person mainly responsible for making the decision of having fillers like these should be demoted or fired.