[Nate the Great]

I consider the books canon because Phil Farrand of Nitpicker's Guide fame says so. If you don't accept any books as canon, then I grant you, there's no possible way ANY of this stuff can be in the same universe from one episode to the next. It is a cardinal rule of nitpicking that all official reference materials from Paramount are considered just as canonical as the episodes themselves.

Yes, none of the other series fit perfectly. When one chucks the first dozen episodes of TOS, which was still the "getting our feet wet" phase, all of the other series have maybe one unavoidable nit per episode on average. The mere existence of Enterprise in a world post first contact with the Klingons without immediately going to war is the one acceptable unavoidable nit. There are tons more, which instantaneously make all other unavoidable nits unacceptable to me. THAT'S why I didn't care about Enterprise. All they had to do was set it in a universe OTHER than the one we've loved for thirty years, and I could love it for being what it is, as long as you call it something other than Star Trek. I like Andromeda because they know how to update continuity with new ideas and still not create entire episodes that spit in the face of the history of the fantasy world.