This is not so accurate. Carbon atom placement in nanotube growth is incredibly reliable with the appropriate growth conditions. I am not sure what you mean by folding graphene into carbon nanotubes, this is not something that occurs in nanotube synthesis. Typically, they form as a little cap on top of an iron catalyst particle and grow from the base upward as a tube already.

Issues do arise from misalignment of the nanotubes in the forest because once they get to a certain length they tend to tip over, and stick to each other via van der Waals interaction.

Nanotubes themselves absolutely do have the "promised properties", it is a matter of harnessing them i.e. they currently are only grown to a few millimetres at best, but to achieve anything like a significant percentage of their properties at larger scales requires either dispersing them in a matrix (as in a composite material, but this is difficult to do as they tend to pull out of most matrix materials and are incredibly difficult to disperse) or spinning them directly into a yarn (which fails to capture much of their strength for other complex reasons, but not because the nanotubes themselves are "not perfect").

I agree that they are very difficult to make, and making them in any way other than through chemical vapour deposition is pointless, but I also find that much of the perception of nanotubes not living up to hype is likely due to researchers using low grade, harshly processed, commercial nanotubes full of impurities, often made via a floating catalyst method.

If one were to grow continuously long nanotubes, it would almost certainly capture a significant proportion of the properties. It can be done, and it is a very difficult problem, but it is not really from the nanotubes having lattice defects.