>>538027689
It's all Colors' fault, possibly egged on by 4Kids and Archie
From Adventure 1 to Black Knight, the games were regionally consistent. There were occasional miscommunications, but Sonic Team overall took pride in cleaning up the canon.
Colors, especially the Wii version, was a writing experiment. It was humor-heavy, but not all the jokes translated (yen conversion rates? what?). Hence Pongraff. Generations was mostly played straight, but some of the "we gotta localize the cartoon humor" mentality carried over to Lost World.
Meanwhile, you have self-aggrandizing writers in inflated egos over at Archie, dealing with their own issues in their small corner. Ian saw a way to worm his way in (get his sycophants to astroturf SoA on his behalf) over the dwindling reception of the tiresome so-called 'meta-era'. Basically weaseling through IDW to get to Frontiers. Frontiers was so bad that the Japanese tried to fix up, bit by the time they caught wind of Ian's script they already timed all the animations so they they said fuck-it and made their final draft JP-exclusive, essentially reintroducing 90's-esque continuity segregation into the series (TailsTube would later shit over Ian for his idiocy here).