The funny thing is, I do consider myself a hardcore Trek fan. Yet I'm completely behind this movie.
I think the continuity issue in Trek has gone WAY out of hand. Now if they, for instance, made Spock an emotional character and dropped the whole notion of Vulcans being logical, I'd be angry. If they made the Enterprise look like a clone of the Battlestar Galactica, I'd be angry. If they turned the Federation into a warmongering empire, lacking in any moral foundation, I'd be angry.
Essentially, I'd not like it if they messed around with the core of the series. I wouldn't be happy if the story did anything that completely jarred with the existing stories (eg. they decide to kill off Scotty or have Kirk destory the Klingon species. Anything that would drastically alter the universe in a way that the later episodes could not happen)
However, I am not going to spaz out because Kirk can now drive a car, even though he couldn't work on out in "A Piece of the Action." I'm not going to freak because the Enterprise no longer looks like a kid's toy. So Robert Aril wasn't the first cpatain of the Enterprise. Time for Paramount to update the Encyclopedia, then.
Face it, these sort of details aren't important. Most of us happily forget that TOS made stupid statements like the Romulans didn't have warp drive during the Earth-Romulan war. THAT is canonically accurate, as its stated in the sho. However, it is also ridiculous, as there's no way the Romulans could have had an interstellar war whilst travelling at the average speed of a tractor.
Star Trek is chock full of inconsistencies and most of them matter squat, in terms of whether the individual stories are entertaining. Who really gives a flying hoot if the Enterprise used to have a matte hull and now its shiny? If it makes you feel any better, perhaps the metal got dulled after flying around in space for a few years and Kirk never bothered to get it waxed (cos, y'know that'd be a lot of wax!)
But the truth is, I'm sorry to say, the Enterprise ISN'T REAL!!! Yep, that's right, it was a little model made out a toilet rolls and an old frisbee. The interiors of the ship were made of cardboard and some Christmas tree lights. How else do you explain the miraculous transformatoin of Starfleet between the end of TOS and the beginning of the first movie? Heck, even the Klingons refitted at least three warships (and their heaRAB) in time for the camera to start rolling again.
But people accept that the series Enterprise and the movie Enterprise only have a basic resemblence to each other, even though they're supposed to be the same ship. Yet now we are seeing the ship reimagined once more, people are complaining that the colour is slightly off or the bridge isn't made of cardboard any more.
Get a grip, people. It's a fricking TV show! So long as it sticks to the core ideas, who cares if the nacelles are ten-minllionths-of-an-inch highers than they used to be?