Granted. But I would argue that something being non-canon because it hasn't been published in a sourcebook and something being non-canon because it explicitly defies what has been published in a sourcebook are two completely different somethings. A homebrew campaign where my mercenaries fight a bunch of pirates on the FWL periphery border during the Invasion and they turn out to be some wayward Diamond Sharks monitoring the situation from afar is a very different scenario from a campaign where my mercenaries fight a bunch of pirates on the FWL periphery border and OMG ITS THE SPEARHEAD OF A SURPRISE INVASION FROM CLAN SPANIEL AND THE LEAGUE IS COLLAPSING ALL AROUND US!!!!!!
It is, of course, a matter of opinion.
Again, granted. But it still comes back around to the question of what we are losing from the teased answers. You're right, we do have a perfectly viable for the Tribe. But what is the downside to that very good answer mayyyyyybe not being THE answer?
Besides, it becomes a slippery slope, doesn't it? Say we get THE answer to the Tribe. Then what? Do we insist in THE answer to Stone? Or Morgan's killer? Or the Walls? Do we keep demanding THE answer until the only mystery left in the BT universe is whether Kerensky turned left or right when he left the parking lot after telling the House Lords that he was moving out?
You aren't wrong. Is it a frustrating thing? Absolutely. Is it a frustrating thing that I can overlook? I think so.
I agree that they are different things, and I think this is why it's ideal that mysteries that are never going to get a concrete answer, should be voids within the canon, rather than filled with contradictory material. If we get one sourcebook that says "The Wolverines were the masterminds behind Oldschool Comstar/Word of Blake" and one sourcebook that says "Uncle Chandy made all of that up" it becomes impossible to touch the issue at all without contradicting canon. The way things are, I can't do ANYTHING with the mystery without stepping over the line.
Ironically, I think it was a bad move filling in the Star League and Early Succession Wars in such detail. I preferred when those were left vague and talked about only in broad strokes, that it left more room to work with when they were just foggy backstory that didn't have hard facts. I liked that, because it left more room to invent new units and events, to establish the ruins of the long past, for use in the present. Now, that's a lot harder.
I was perfectly happy never really knowing what became of the Wolverines, leaving the question unanswered. but it undermines my faith in every sourcebook before and after, to be given an answer and then have that answer directly contradicted. Something like "what is the fortress wall and how does it work" is a pretty important, and I will be severely let down if the question is never resolved. Too big a deal has been made of it, and it's too game-changing to feel like anything but a cop-out to never answer. We've already HAD the answer to "Who was stone" at least as far as things went under Herb's watch, I just saw the screenshot I took for posterity last night. (answer: nobody special.) And having the answer to what he intended as the 5 hidden worlds was both satisfying and useful to me as a GM. I came across the screenshot I made for that too.
Something like morgan's killer is a far narrower topic. There's no bloodhouses to be created if his killer is found, but if you kill a wolverine descendant, you get to found your own bloodname. If you figure out who stone is, you scratch an itch, have a piece of trivia. If I knew what the nature of the Fortress Wall was, I could justify bypassing it and continuing my campaign despite the plot-drought. If knowing the answer to something is going to enable me to accomplish something, yes, I'm going to want to know the answer.
There's also Empires Aflame. Proves that there's interest, that there's a place for telling different stories by establishing different settings, rather than through omission of facts.
Bottom line is, I can't avoid crossing the line, if it's made impossible to tell where the line even IS.