I don’t know what i think. We know they just write as they go along. I sort of think that they brought Zelena back in because they knew people weren’t liking what they were doing. I also don’t think they initially planned for Alice to be with Robyn. It is hard to know though if they had another plan or they just didn’t have a plan for who Alice’s love interest would be and what they were going to do with Regina and Zelena and made this one up because they realized people weren’t really like Henry and Ella all that much.
Though, the problem with Henry and Ella is that the writers are bad writers, so they could also just fix the bad writing of those characters.