Well, here's what Means said back in Feb 2009:
Let me don my flame suit.
(You know it's never good when a Producer utters those words!)
So first off, we are all aware there is a bit of a big-picture "neutral question." Meaning that basically it's a side-but-not. The "neutral question" comes up from time-to-time in meetings, and especially when the NPE was getting designed. Developers on AO have a wide variety of opinions on the subject, and nothing specifically has been decided about neutrals. Nothing has been decided because we don't really have time to address this issue right now; we just had to make sure the NPE was designed in such away that it could be easily tweaked to accommodate all likely outcomes.
Secondly, and just to get this out of the way, Means didn't mention specifically "neutral neck items." He just said vaguely that he would work something out to address a balance issue. On the third page of a "Friday With Means."
So thirdly, lets just say when I joined AO there were a lot of promises (or perceived promises) on the table. It takes less than 30 seconds to write a post saying that "we'll address X" or "we'll do X" but it also takes anywhere from days to weeks to years to deliver on X from when work starts to when it gets patched out. If we were working on all outstanding promises made in the last 11 years of AO -- all in parallel -- we would never get anything done. Ever. If you want to hold the development team to every single one of these, we would be completely paralysed. In fact, it is my firm belief that what the game needs right now is lazer-focus on our top priorities.
So, what are our top priorities? As I've said before, they are: Engine, Server Merge, NPE... followed by profession rebalance... followed probably by (and don't take this as a promise, because things can change) some ground-work in preparation for the next booster/expansion. I
suspect we'll take a look at neutrals if we end up expanding upon PvP, purely for PvP balance reasons. Not a promise, just what I foresee happening.