As a Neal fan, I don’t know whether to laugh or cry over how many fans this show has managed to alienate — all for the sake of the one-handed pirate with a drinking problem. Neal fans certainly saw his death as the show’s downfall, and I don’t think we were wrong. Each passing season has revealed that the show suffers when it promotes CS at all costs.
I would disagree that the sole cause of the show’s downfall is the writers promoting CS to the exclusion of all else. Personally, I think OUAT started going downhill around Cora’s death – well before Neal’s death. There’s an assumption in there that the writers had a plan for the show, and if they’d stuck to it, everything would have been good. But we’ve discussed (extensively) here how A and E are unskilled at character development, relationship building, world building, how poor they are at planning, how they change their plans simply to surprise the fans, how they might not even have created S1 without outside help. There’s nothing to suggest that the show would have been of a higher quality had they stuck to their so called original plan (if there was such a thing) or if they had not paired up Emma and Hook. I suspect it would still have been poor and offensive, only in a different way. They may well have assisinated Neal’s character, the way they have with Rumple, Snowing and Emma. We’ll never know, and the unknown seems more appealing than the current mess. Basically, it boils down to A&E being mediocre show runners, nothing more, nothing less.