This character had such promise.  I still grew to like him despite his disconnect with the Younger Bae, but his best episode was probably "Manhattan" after which he was underused, underdeveloped and glossed over.

Speaking about "Quiet Minds", I know this season is all about flashbacks to the missing year, and discovering along with the characters what happened.  In some ways, that was effective in that the viewers and the characters realized together that Neal was a goner.

If the writers are intent on saying that Neal didn't have a choice when he let August convince him to leave Emma, they need to explain why rather than to have the character repeat he didn't have a choice and Emma agreeing.  

Since I liked Neal, I kind of wished that his final episode would have the old-school reflective flashbacks. They could have shown how his imprisonment in Neverland might have changed him, how his second return to our world turned him into the Neal we now know, maybe better insight into why he made the decision with August, how he started to try to find Emma but he lost courage, maybe how he started to go to Storybrooke after getting the postcard and how he ended up turning back.  That all would have made his death more poignant, and would at least try to bridge the distance between Young Bae and Adult Neal.  It seemed to reinforce that the writers didn't care much about and had no idea what to do with the character since they threw his death in some random middle-of-the-season episode.

As a character from the "real world", I think his character did have a lot of potential, and it's sad that he paid the ultimate price for Rumple trying to find him.  I mean, what's the point... Rumple could have just let him go out into the Ogre Wars and die there.  Yes, he ended up creating Henry, but Neal and Henry even didn't get a final father/son scene together.