Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-25926288-20161205015930/@comment-25926288-20170219213537

There's a lot of personal opinion, so let's go with importance to the overarching story. Neal is important in the major characters: Rumple and Emma for roughly three seasons.

All of those others you mentioned are less relevant. No matter if you like them or hate them, none of those folk are relevant to Emma's life as much as Neal, nor are they as relevant to Rumple's. I mean, Leopold and Eva are barely relevant to Snow and Regina's story. Milan even less so as she only has connections with Rumple and Hook and was pretty one-note. So, in other words, the show has foundational roots in Rumple's, Emma's, and Snow/Regina's story and Neal checks 2/3 and was around for numerous episodes and earlier seasons. (Like seriously, that list of folk were in like enclosed arcs or in less than ten episodes).