What Paul Dini and Bruce Timm are doing on the animated show is right on target, brilliant stuff. Fliesher cartoons are wonderful. They all add to the mythos. In reality, he's one of the first published super-heroes and yet, in order to keep him young and vital, he's been established as a character who came after many characters he actually preceded on the printed page. He hasn't been absent from the Golden Age.
Continuity is something that is best thought of like a cat.
It's nice to have around when you want to play with it, but you can keep a cat outside too and nobody will notice, but the cat. He CAN get married and then deal with that. All that timeline stuff just gives me a headache. It was certainly an interesting contrast. Yeah, I miss those stories.