I do like the spirit of neocities, and recently did a page myself: gallery-mental.neocities.org just to collect the artwork of my family in a fun way. Stuff gets put in boxes and never looked at again otherwise.
I do agree though that the focus is a little bit too much on old school design. Instead of emulating what was it would be nice to see people innovate what could be. Web sites of today just looks the same somehow. The spirit of experimentation should make a come back to web design and that's only viable when there is no monetary concerns.