I agree that The Charmings did not have to shut the door on ten year old Emma in order to save everyone from the curse. Rumple prophesied that she would return to break the curse on her 28th birthday, but nothing I’ve heard about this curse says she had to be exactly that age to break it. She was built into the curse as the product of the true love of her parents and I think she could’ve broken it at any time with true love’s kiss.
The real issue is how exactly ‘true love’s kiss’ works. We’ve seen all manner of curse breaking kisses most notably between Snow and Charming in The Pilot, Rumple and Belle in Skin Deep, and Emma and Henry in the season one finale. But we’ve also seen so many instances of it NOT working, I guess because one of the people in the kiss wasn’t in love at the time, that I still find it confusing and let’s not forget the stunning story of Hook’s dad being woken from a sleeping curse by an utter STRANGER who just happened to fall in love with his sleeping face. I mean I can sort of buy that some woman fell in love with a sleeping stranger, people fall in love with people they don’t really know all the time, but how could he possibly truly love her back if he was ASLEEP?
As nice as it was to re-visit curse era Storybrooke, I really think this is a plot that needed to be dropped. I’d much rather have seen them all work together to maybe trick The Black Fairy into helping them somehow break the double sleeping curse or maybe have everyone in town who are ‘true loves’ gather around the sleeping Charmings and true love kiss each other until the shockwaves woke them up. Hey it’s silly, but no sillier than having everyone drink a curse Regina made or found and have that somehow dilute the one the Charmings were already under.