There was a line that one actor from Grimm, talking about bring dead characters to the show and he said something like this, “if we keep bringing dead characters back, or finding ways to bring them back, why would our audience feel or care about the characters, if is that easy to bring back the deads”, in a way, this goes to Emma character, does the show still needs a Savior? Is Emma still important to the show, when every season, they come with the worst villain of all villains and yet they come with silly stuff to defeat them and emma is never the responsable for that.
I think Emma title as savior ended on S1, after breaking that curse and now she is a normal character like all of them, bc if she was relevant to the story, i think having her as dark one, would have been the best way of ending the show and making emma defeating the darkness by herself, since they didnt do that, can someone tell me how is now relevant to the story is Emma? She started the S5 being called the worst of the worst villains, yet was nothing about her, was all about Hook, her flashbacks are now retcons, of previous stablish things, so i dont think the story would suffer that much if Emma would die, but stay dead for real, bc she is no longer needed, at this point even Rumple with his is good is bad is more essencial to the story and the same goes with regina, than Emma herself, heck even Belle that has no screen time, is more essencial to the story than Emma at least for me.
In the end Emma problem is not just CS, is the writing, the fact is OUAT should have ended long time ago, or at least have only 13 epis season per year, that way i think the writing would not be so bad and the characters would be way more develop than they are now with seasons with 23 episodes, where most are fillers, and each episode is a retcon of something that the characters did on previous episode.