I wouldn't mind going back to TR either. :) And yeah . . . I've always been puzzled about the HP-fandom obsession with canon-congruity too--I'm sort of wondering if that might be an artifact specifically of fandoms for in-progress book series, or even more specifically of the HP series, for whatever reason. Especially coming from comics fandom, where canon is shifted around at the whim of the editorial-staff-at-the-time, and the only real consistency is that next summer (though right now it's more like "two months from now," ye gods) there's going to be another companywide megacrossover that says that what happened in this one didn't happen the way we thought it did (or didn't happen at all.)

And anyway now we have the whole story of Harry, so we can feel free to go off on tangents without wondering whether we'll be directly contradicted in the next book. There's no more official "what happens next" so, I think, there's a lot more freedom to play around with "what happens if." Not that there wasn't already, but maybe now that the story's completely over the fandom can stop being so much about predictions and who's going to end up guessing right.