Sure, absolutely use whatever works for you!
My posts were mostly in response to Hussar claiming that certain points of view were invalid due to established canon. I say that is complete hogwash.
Canon is of course, official material, but as you pointed out what constitutes official may vary slightly (do video games count? novels? comics? etc.) and may vary over time or from author to author and edition to edition. For a fun look at how crazy canon can be, try to reconcile pretty much anything in Star Trek. They never could maintain consistency, even from one episode to the next, let alone across seasons or series. That's why I find practically no value in the concept of a "shared world". By necessity everyone's version of it WILL be different. The value comes in using it as a starting point for ideas and to save work. I think Gygax understood this very well when he released the early Greyhawk products.
I suppose there is a bit of difference in philosophy in my point of view as well. Where some may see canon as the default path, and choosing to abandon it as a conscious decision; I much prefer the idea of complete freedom of imagination, with canon material as merely a single example of what can be done. It may seem like a small matter of semantics (glass half full vs half empty), but I think how you view it mentally has a pretty big impact on what you are willing to attempt in your games. We already get enough conditioning to accept commercial products as somehow superior to DIY without it watering down our imaginations as well.
In a way creating a campaign world is much more a destructive act than constructive, i.e. for every choice you make, you rule out countless other possibilities. Limiting yourself to a single interpretation made by a committee or an unrelated string of authors stretched over decades whose primary goal is to sell books, would be a disserve to yourself and your players, don't you think?
