It is like their minds just don’t notice. I think that makes sense completely. There is so much that people don’t noticed in real life. It is like there is something wrong with their memories. It is like they have a blind spot in their memories and we really don’t know what it was like in town before Emma came. Now that Emma is in town things seem fairly normal except everyone is rather unhappy, but people still do normal things like go to work and go out on dates and hang out with friends, but before Emma came into town maybe everyone just got up and went to work and had really bad dates and went home. They interacted with Henry and that seems to have woke people up a bit because Archie was telling Henry to not give into his dark side and Mary gave Henry the book, but before Henry it may have been worse.
Like maybe Mary had been going on a really bad date with Dr. Whale every once in awhile for years. It is like there is something wrong with their memories. It is like nothing important happened to them in the last 28 years so there is nothing to notice, no defining characteristics, and they are all just unaware of the passage of time. They have no concept of years gone by and such. That is all different now that Emma is here and time has resumed. I think Ashley is lucky that she can’t remember being nine months pregnant for 28 years. That doesn’t sound like fun.
PS, It is like they are working around the holes in people’s concentration. Like people can’t concentrate on those things because there is something wrong with them.