I don't think with comics its really fair to give the creative team a benefit of the doubt, bossbot. Across the entire comic community these days there's a fair amount of misrepresentation and deception that is intended to lure fans into buying certain comics thinking one thing but giving them totally another. There are instances when writers and editors flat out lie to the fans via news reports and whatnot that one thing is the case and then as you read you realise that's not the case at all. For instance, Marvel's X-Men First Class was touted originally as fitting into original X-Men continuity. They were supposed to be stories between the original stories of the X-Men. That's turned out to not be the case. And Marvel have never come out and admitted that. Yet in all their pre-advertising that's how they marketed at. There are countless more examples across the bolard.

So I don't blame some of the others for being harsh on the writer and editor. He might be an Aussie but I don't like the practice of most comic companies today. There's a high level of misrepresentation that goes on to lure and compel readers to buy stuff even when the editors know the cold hard fact that they're not telling the truth. In fact when they are confronted by an interviewer they give a very frustrating "We knew it all from the start but b/c the story was..." line.

So a lot of the time you have to draw inferences and can't rely on the words of even the writers and editors and I hold firmly to the view that this isn't meant to be in continuty but IDW are trying to maintain that it is to keep hold of the existing readers following their line while attracting new readers as IDWs TF stuff has been on a heavy decline for over two years now.

I think you'll notice too that AHM is much more DW styled. And I think they're trying to stick to that nostalgic G1 feel unlike Furman who was creating his own universe. Furman's story which wasn't very G1-esque though it used G1 characters.