yeah people insist it's an unbelievably hard task for Minato or Jiraiya to lay a hand on an opponent, and then they have the gall to call others fanboys
jiraiya has close to top tier taijutsu and speed, 4.5. not to mention the big boost he gets with sm, plus his shadow clones.
against Pain, Jiraiya only had trouble with the animal path because he decided to enter sage mode as he was facing the rinnegan and so couldnt use jutsu. He was still able to make clones and enter sm that way, and only came to the realisation that that Pain was only using animal path jutsu later.
apart from Madara, Nagato and TBB, Jiraiya has the best area of effect jutsu in the series. His underworld swamp, goemon, needle senbon and oil bullet and are both very large and very hard to avoid.
then, he is very skilled with kage bunshin, barrier techniques, and toad shadow manipulation techniques. This, coupled with his needle jizo techniques, make him very difficult to hit or harm in a fight.
In short, taking into his account his massive stamina, his vast arsenal of jutsu, and his ability to mold the environment to his liking, coupled with very destructive finishers like twin-ball or sage-art rasengan or his lion mane's techniques, means that no one will fight him easily. The fact that he's tied for highest in the databook, along with Itachi (above Orochimaru,Bee, Kisame, Kakuzu, Sasori etc incidentally), and tops the list of s-rank missions by a landslide speaks volumes. I'm not going to go into the hype, as that's a very subjective issue, but he has plenty.
as to feats, he did one-shot Konan, then proceed to defeating 3 paths of Pain (apart from the genjutsu, he did blind one, capture another, and devise a great strategy to break up their linked vision). Without an arm, he was still able to spar with the 6 pains for a while and capture one, which when you consider the likes of Kakashi were only able to fight two or so at once, albeit the strongest two, it's saying something.
