I see that currently project Neon is targeting the next LTS release of Ubuntu. Is there any plans to backport to older LTS releases, in particular 14.04?

I hope I'm not the only one who is looking forward to switching to KDE/Plasma 5 but who is constrained by company IT to only use LTS releases of Ubuntu, and won't be able to switch until the company gives the OK to switch to 16.04 which probably won't be until this fall at earliest (some LTS users might be even more tightly bound to their LTS releases). I'd love to upgrade to KDE 5, but can't without upgrading to the next LTS because there isn't any easy install path for current LTS releases (I'd rather not set up a whole dev setup to compile everything myself).

I'm afraid not, it's 16.04 LTS only