I'll boil down several hours of discussion to one sentence, because it was the clinching argument (and not one that Dan or Moskop or I came up with -- it actually came up from the community, and then we just saw it and were like, "aw crap"):
"I don't want to have to explain to a player that we have a new Data who is the same as Data (Premiere) in almost every way, represents the TNG Data, who dates Jenna D'Sora and is a friend to Keiko... but he can't
observe greatness because he's not
that Data somehow."
Basically, any Data who fixed these unintuitive broken links would
necessarily be so similar to original-flavor Data that it would create unintuitive confusingness in the other direction, making a bunch of cards that reference "Data" by card title suddenly weird.
The rejoinder was: "well, the game has weird stuff like that anyway and it's legally fine." Which is true.
But the rejoinder to
that was, "but the whole reason for this card is to try to make the weird but legally fine stuff less weird, and instead we're making some things less weird while making some other things more weird."
(And it's not just Historical Poker Game; that was just the example that came up. There's a number of cards that name Data specifically, and which would be bizarre not to have work with "Lt. Commander Data," like Investigate Time Continuum.)
So Lt. Commander Data was renamed to
Data (Cold Front), we "fixed" as many links as we could given the space in his lore box, and that was that. I think it was the right call -- but then, I would, since I was on that team that got persuaded it was the right call. You might not agree.
I have since joined #TeamErrataTheWeirdPremiereLoreReferences, although that hashtag is too long for a practical Twitter campaign.
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