To me True Gen1 will always be a cartoon/self imagined toy-play hybrid because that was all I was exposed to growing up (it's strange to look back and realise how little time that actually was but how much it has affected me).

I enjoy the separate reiterations of the same basic concept - I suppose because I'm more about the toys than the story - but I very much see them very much as being separate. If IDW wants to retconn Drift into Gen1 I'm fine with that - because it's just not My Gen1, it's their's.

Classics-verse in my opinion can be anything - there are no true story contraints - and in certain ways that's great. For better or worse there would be no way Hasbro have released a dedicated War for Cybertron line... and now we should be getting WFC Devastator. That sounds like a decent trade off.