Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-24589671-20150309010651/@comment-5106672-20150311163614

Personally, I think OUAT's problems aways begin when the writers suddenly get the rights for something not exactly planned at that point in time and rush to do that, namely Neverland and Frozen. Especially Neverland: I think that's essentially what "went wrong" with the show. They had a story, they had a few setups yet to exploit, then they got the rights for Peter Pan and had to bend the show into that: they dropped, pushed into the background or ended abruptly a lot of great storylines (Cora, Amnesiac Belle, Neal himself and his relationship with Rumple, where the book came from, how Henry got to Storybrooke) and pulled out new ones point blank, which were mostly inconsistent with what we had seen before (the Dragon, the prophecy with Rumple's conflict about Henry, and, above all, the goddamn Home Office). We got a bunch of as yet unexplained stuff about Neverland, during which they tried to squeeze a few of the former key plots (Rumple and Neal, Henry's adoption, the book's origin), which felt unsatisfying because at the time the writers were telling another story which stole the scene to things that had a very strong build up and needed to get the focus themselves.

In that respect, the Curse undone and subsequent missing year plot was a very clever move: they basically "reset" the show to clean or hide the mess they had made, and to me it worked… until they put everything on hold for the Frozen arc. And this, imo, is how we ended up with too much stuff all at Once (pun intended) which resulted in an excess of characters and self-focussing plots that pushed some formerly pivotal ones further and further into the background except for some random reappearances.