Kakashi is one of my favorite characters in the series, even though he hasn't had much to do lately.

I was looking back over the series and I think that Kakashi is actually a pretty bad teacher. I think he's much better suited to leading missions than to being responsible for training ninjas. Let's look at what he did with team 7 :

Naruto - Basically didn't teach him anything, Naruto's progress has been more or less due to his personal ambition and rivalry with Sasuke. I think the funniest thing Kakashi taught Naruto was the 1000 years of pain, I about died when he did that to Gaara! Lol.

Sakura - Wow. Absolutely nothing.

Sasuke - Indisputably his best work was done with Sasuke, which is also a huge problem. You think he would have noticed Sasuke's severe mental problems, and dangerous obsession with Itachi. Instead of mentally mentoring Sasuke and strengthening his moral character, he teaches him an effectively useless (against Itachi) assassination jutsu. Sasuke needs to learn genjutsu defenses and possibly summons (like the dogs Kakashi brought against Zabuza!). Not only does his work with Sasuke seem to be narrow-minded, he also does this to the exclusion of Sakura and Naruto.

To be fair, Kakashi's past is pretty twisted, and he probably wasn't thrilled at the idea of having to deal with kids (he never passed any of his previous candidates, apparently).

I would have loved to see Sasuke/Sakura/Naruto's development had they been given Gai as a sensei. I'm sure Gai would have forced Naruto to develop some serious taijutsu instead of relying upon contant Kage Bunshin + basic punch/kick. And Sakura probably would have had to get serious as well. Sasuke arguably wouldn't have been any better off with Gai, but I don't think he would have suffered from it either.

Thoughts?