If you look up china meta from that time, 3rd ay was used way more often than 4th. 4th became popular again after his skillbreak. Partial reason for that, is 4th relies solely on buffs (and tag) to deal damage and in cloud/gnw treasure meta there is a lot of buff removal either during chase or with mystery. 3th has another passive source of damage, which is chakra scaling. If you remove all buffs, 3rd comes ahead. Also while 3rd's team contains pretty significant r1 damage, r2 is basically a dead ninja/line of ninjas.