Can they bring the show back to what made it great even with the loss of Neal? I still think they can.
Well, of course they could; they’re writers who create a fantasy universe where magic happens on a weekly occurrence. They can do just about anything with their pens/keyboards. It’s not all about Neal. Killing Neal was a symptom of the change and the best example anyone can point to in order to demonstrate the sort of change that took place, but not the change itself. I’d agree with something @Gautheria said in another thread that Neal was a node in network that worked together. They may have killed the node but that doesn’t mean the network can’t still work; but on top of killing the Neal-node, the writers dismantled the network. What took the networks place is the creature that I keep calling OUAT version 2.0 and that version has no place not only for Neal but for version 1. It’s not the same show anymore and while you could make a case that you can always fix something that is broken, I could counter it with the fact that in doing so would fracture the show even more. S3B-5A might be thematically disconnected from S1-S3A, but 3B-present at least work together in its clumsy, morally bankrupt way. To suddenly revert back to Version 1 would give everyone whiplash.