A philosophical question re: The Simpsons

Tonight while watching "Please Homer, Don't Hammer 'Em", I realized that the writers at The Simpsons have probably gone through a huge number of changes in the 17-odd seasons the show has been going. To this end, I really can't blame them for inventing new allergies for Bart that he's never had before.

I say "new allergies", because diehard fans like me know that Bart has double-O negative blood and is allergic to butterscotch and imitation butterscotch. I would have loved to see them go refer back to this canonical statement of yesteryear, but I realize now that, like a soap opera, The Simpsons uses only as much of its past as is convenient, and invents new things ad hoc just to keep enough momentum to make it through another episode.

Perhaps it is now time for them to retcon the series? Perhap they already have?

I could envision a season of the show taken off on one of their frequent "What if" tangents. The family has already been to China, Japan, Brazil, Australia, and England. Why not spent the energy doing a bigger project where they're in one of their numerous "future episodes", or they move to Capital City for more than the duration of a baseball game?

The show is obviously treading old ground, and with far more lackluster results. Perhaps it's time they fully divorce themselves of past episodes and finally hook up the big red reboot button that Matt Groening tossed into the back of his desk drawer back in 1989. They've already reinvented so much of the past — and ignored so much of the conflict and change they've introduced throughout the series — that the show seems like it's losing its place. I can't expect the current crop of writers to remember every last detail of the show, but if they're not going to try, they may as well start with a tabula rasa and move forward in their own direction.