As i've always said, the old storyline means something due to the stuff we filled with our own imaginations
You mean... we'd have to think for ourselves!? That everything isn't cut and dry? Fuck that noise!
...Srsly tho, I actually like some gaps that don't have an easy explanation. Sure, sometimes (okay, a lot of the time) it's due to incompetence or someone trying to pick up where someone else left off, not really knowing their original intentions, but the mystery is often half the fun.
For example, it used to drive me crazy that there was no explicit ties between the Mega Man Original and X series. But Keiji Inafune gave some insight on this that made me rethink my view of it:
"I get a lot of people asking me if Serges is Wily. I always give them the same answer, 'He might be... he might not be.' (laughs) I think this is one of those things that is best left without an official comment. As creators, one of the fun things we get to do is plant seeds of imagination in our players and let them come to their own conclusions."
This is also why the idea of an official Zelda timeline doesn't really interest me. The insane theories that people come up with about certain symbols are amazing sometimes, ie The Message Behind Majora's Mask:
http://www.zeldauniverse.net/articles/the-message-of-majoras-mask/Maybe it's just because I was an English lit major, but I've become increasingly fond of things that require you to come up with an explanation rather than just handing it to you.
And all of this stuff is why I cringe at origin stories, such as Lament of Innocence. It's a great game, but I honestly never really wanted to know where Dracula "came from".