Throw 'runs a successful construction/painting' business in there too, James.
ANYWAYS
Leinator has things pretty spot-on too. It isn't so much the casual discussion, because casual discussion on just about anything is pointless by default. But, like he said: The LOZ Historian incident with the drama and whatnot. It seems like an abnormally large amount of effort to put into something you really aren't going to get much (if any) results out of. Spending ages trying to link games together in timelines that are tenuous at best is really just a fruitless effort. It seems to me like one would have better luck trying to chronilogically order the ages of all the spiders living in your basement.
And like I said before, the Split Timeline only reinforces my thoughts that they messed things up so bad there was no other way to explain it. Parallel universes is a perfect example of deus ex machina, where there was no other way to explain inconsistencies that the only way to patch some of the holes was to say "Well, uh... some of the games are in an alternate timeline! Yeah!" It's a last-ditch effort plot device, as you can solve just about anything with a parallel universe or two.