I had a feeling you'd say something along those lines.
Muse time, because this isn't really fit for a new topic (too personal) or a dA journal:
For the longest time, I've been wondering why so many fans of Classic Mega treat the cartoon as if it's Azathoth about to devour the game canon. The two are so obviously different; it felt like purist whining/confusion to me. Now that I've thought about it, though, maybe I'M the one who's confused.
Flash back to 2000 or so. My first exposure to Sonic the Hedgehog (real exposure, not just seeing his visage in a store sign) was the near-universally loathed Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog. I watched it and soon became a fan of the character and his friends and enemies. A while later, I got the Sonic 3 and Knuckles pack for PC. The setting was different from the cartoon, but I was cool with that.
What confused me was Robotnik. In AoStH, he had a very distinct design and personality, one I had grown used to. In the game...he had that same hover-vehicle (more or less), but he looked different. I didn't get it, but I fought him anyway.
Come middle school, I finally have access to this strange thing called "the Internet". There's actually MANY Robotniks (and Sonics and Tails), each for a different facet of the Sonic mythos. As I read about each facet, I learn that they're all split off from the main source (the games) and have many unique aspects (such as SatAM's crapsack world, AoStH's lunacy, SU's slight less crapsack world, etc.). I'm perfectly cool with, and interested by, this.
TL;DR: I grew up believing that if there's a third-party production of something that deviates from the source material, it is a canon unto itself.
So far, so good. After Sonic and DBZ (timeline headaches for the win), I enter the Megaman fandom. Turns out there's lots of third-party stuff for it, too. I find out more about the cartoon--and apparently, almost no one likes it. I did, and infuriatingly, most of the complaints can be traced back to "It doesn't follow the canon of the games."
"What the hell", I think. "The cartoon, while based on the Classic games, clearly isn't part of their canon and should not be taken as such. What's the big deal about it not following the canon?"
Now that I've thought about it, maybe it's because I'm used to third-party deviance, while the ones that complain about RS-MM in that manner aren't (or simply don't like it; I can't say). Either way, petty purist whining is [tornado fang]ing annoying.