Actually, I uh... meant things like why Porre is a massive military power all of a sudden,
A twist, but not one that I thought required explanation.
all the time travel models that inevitably ended up conflicting with each other,
I'd say that's less something that was insufficiently explained than simple bad writing.
what happened to the CT crew that wasn't Lucca or Robo,
It's pretty clearly implied that Crono and Marle are dead, but I don't remember a "how" in there anywhere. Frog and Ayla would have been long-dead, and Guile was supposed to be Magus, at least at one point in the writing.
how the Masamune turned evil and ended up in a large island archipelago never seen in CT,
That one I'll grant. I think it was in one of the new endings on the PS1 version of CT.
and generally anything that is only mentioned in things like Perfect Works guides and the published equivalent of scribbled margin notes.
Yeah, basically all the continuity stuff feels slapdash; see response to Classic, below.
Now that I think about it ("it" being a total non sequitur), CT never really took the time travel thing as seriously as CC did; it routinely used different types of time travel models but it never actually drew attention to them so you never really questioned it. It was all just, "here's the problem, here's how we're going to fix it." When CC tried to be all complex, that was when people started thinking about time travel when their minds wandered from the byzantine morass that was the main story.
CT never took ANYTHING as seriously as CC did.
I'm on the fence about whether Thad actually agrees or not. It's pretty damned confusing!
I didn't think it was ambiguous. All the Trigger callbacks in Cross feel like poorly-explained, shoehorned-in fanfic; Hak's got several examples I've quoted above.
I guess I wouldn't go so far as to say they diminish BOTH CT and CC, as the latter's story would STILL be a fucking godawful mess even without all the CT stuff, but the "EVERYBODY DIES" revelation is totally out of step with the upbeat tone of CT. (Though again, working Lucca's death in as a retread of her mother's crippling in the original is appropriate.)
As I understand it, the incongruities within Cross are somewhat intentional, i.e. all the mucking about in the timestream and parallel universes has caused everything to be, frankly, fucked the hell up.
Right; any game that's about parallel universes can be safely dismissed from belonging to the same timeline as the original.