The writers can do as they please and when they are inconsistent with the 'Universe'/timeline they positioned themselves in they can also be called on it. They wanted the kudos of TOS and marketed Discovery to exploit that right down to having Spock's brand new sister created as part of their artistic vision. They therefore ensured that there be a consistent look to good ole familiar Vulcans. However they couldn't quite resist the temptation to give us Klingons that look nothing like ones we see in TOS. That is a fail.
Poll Do you consider Discovery to truly be in the Prime Timeline at this point?
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This is a non sequitur.
EDIT: Also, Klingons don't look like Klingons. They never have.
Magic Augment bloodThat's okay. Magic tribble blood will bring me back to life.
That's personal preference not a canon violation
Honestly, no. Otherwise, we would flail about with TMP, and TUC, and on and on.
Not so sure about that. Unlike, say Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles or Transformers, all the pieces of the Star Trek franchise have been written with the idea that they're part of the same world. (TAS maybe the lone exception, but even that was written as a continuation of TOS at the time and has been confirmed to be fully canonical since -- albeit with the live action stuff taking seniority when discrepancies arise.)
Roddenberry also decided that his novel was not canonical. (In any event, the TMP novelization has never been considered canon, so it's not an accurate source.
Star Trek was arguably doing it long before it became a thing (also, most of the aesthetic differences are in regards to different eras.)
That's personal preference not a canon violation
Yes and no; it's my personal preference that Lorce didn't own a hatched Horta, but the reason that I have that preference is because, based on the evidence, it is a canon violation.
I'll still hold his opinion in higher regard than the Internet's.
Because...there is a plausible reason it could exist?
Best Steppenwolf song ever. Zefram Cochrane had good taste in music.
Oh, no! What will we endlessly argue about?!
Same difference. He was the one who decided that it was not in continuity in the first place.
Because...there is a plausible reason it could exist?
I submit that "The Devil in the Dark" (TOS) doesn't allow any loopholes. It's explicitly stated and shown that the Hortas started their phase of a mother and eggs fifty thousand years before DSC and TOS and that the eggs did not hatch until a decade after Lorca was seen with one in DSC. Furthermore, the tunnels that lead to the Horta's levels did not exist until a decade after DSC. A unhatched baby Horta would be impossible to find or get to if all three of those statements are true, and to the best of my memory, that is what the episode said.
Therefore, I submit that there is not a plausible reason that it could exist.
Thus I submit that it's not a Horta egg but rather an Easter egg!
I hate easter eggs. Always hollow on the inside, and not as satisfying as if they'd been one solid mass of chocolate.
And yet, works of fiction have been created (and marketed!) with that understanding for a long time. The exact definition is a little fuzzy and varies a bit by medium (does it require multiple stories? multiple central characters? multiple series? multiple authors? multiple media? etc.), but there are lots of examples.
For instance: Marvel and DC Comics have been doing shared universes among multiple comics series since 1961 and 1959 (or arguably 1941!) respectively; Marvel in particular has always been pretty explicit about it, and has been marketing under the term "Marvel Universe" since at least 1982 when it published its first Official Handbook. In literature, the Oz books have been published since 1900, Burroughs' Barsoom since 1912, and Robert E. Howard's "Hyborean Age" dates back to 1929. Larry Niven first began writing his "Known Space" stories in 1964, and opened it up to other authors at least by the 1980s. In film, Universal was crossing over its monster characters as far back as Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man in 1943, and Toho was doing the same with its monsters since King Kong vs. Godzilla in 1962. On TV, the Mary Tyler Moore-based and All In The Family-based "families" of spinoff shows date back to 1970 and 1971, respectively. And all that's just some of the most widely-known examples, and all before the launch of TNG in 1987. Push forward into the 1990s, and examples multiply like rabbits.
Most fans largely take continuity in all works with a grain of salt. The only people that have taken canon/continuity so seriously and rigidly are a fraction of fans, especially those without a hint of irony or a sense of humor. This goes beyond just Trek. Ultimately, it's all a work of fiction, it's not supposed to mirror documentaries with meticulous attention to detail. That doesn't mean everything should be chaotic continuity wise, just that it's not a rule that can't be broken. Take James Bond films for example: On Her Majesty's Secret Service ignores a major plot point from the previous film (Bond and Blofeld meeting face to face) and has them meet again in person and not immediately recognize each other. Does that ruin the film? Not at all, in fact it's generally highly ranked among fans. Just goes to show that continuity is not everything.
Oh look, argumentum ad populum, ad hominem, and a straw man, all in one paragraph! 
In reverse order: nobody's arguing that continuity is everything (just that the DSC creators have been needlessly casual and ambiguous with it); my sense of irony and sense of humor are just fine, thank you (but not really pertinent to this discussion), and so are everyone else's as far as I can tell, nor is it "rigid" to try to take a logically consistent approach to things; and even if you were in a position to generalize about what "most fans" think (which you're not), that would hardly resolve the discussion at hand, because it's not really a majoritarian question.
Also, the James Bond film series is plainly not a good example to use for any discussion about continuity, because it has hardly ever even pretended to have any.
Basically your whole stance here comes down to "laugh it off, it doesn't matter, nobody cares," which is seldom a constructive addition to any kind of conversation.
In reverse order: nobody's arguing that continuity is everything (just that the DSC creators have been needlessly casual and ambiguous with it); my sense of irony and sense of humor are just fine, thank you (but not really pertinent to this discussion), and so are everyone else's as far as I can tell, nor is it "rigid" to try to take a logically consistent approach to things; and even if you were in a position to generalize about what "most fans" think (which you're not), that would hardly resolve the discussion at hand, because it's not really a majoritarian question.
Also, the James Bond film series is plainly not a good example to use for any discussion about continuity, because it has hardly ever even pretended to have any.
Basically your whole stance here comes down to "laugh it off, it doesn't matter, nobody cares," which is seldom a constructive addition to any kind of conversation.
Yes.
I take it you never witnessed a debate in a Bond forum over how Daniel Craig's Bond suddenly had an Aston Martin with a driver's seat on the right side when he originally had it on the left.
I've heard this a lot. I guess my big question is: if we're supposed to laugh it all off because it doesn't matter, then why is it so important that this show be "Prime"?
Because the story adds to and benefits from the context of what has come before. Obviously this is going to be a matter of taste, but (as one example) I love the way "Lethe" and "Journey to Babel" interact with each other, each adding layers to the other in terms of characterization.
MU Lorca knows what it is, picked it up by transporter and beamed it aboard as a trophy.
Simple.
Because the events are important, not the larger aesthetic or every little detail or character moment.
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