True, it's a bit more subtle than continuity. More of a disregard for anything else besides the characters he likes. He took Bishop, but teamed him up with a character from his 80's run. He shoehorned in Kitty Pryde, Rachel Summers (whom I had to look up on wikipedia when she came back because last I knew she was an old woman in the future), and Dazzler...in England...for no reason. Whatever was going on in continuity before he took over would be shoved aside to fit in the characters he knew best...from a decade or more earlier. Look at Exiles, where all the characters were his (and Morph was possessed by Proteus, since he knew him better).
I remember my reaction to "Excalibur" #1 (the Genosha series, not to be confused with the WTF reboot with Dazzler and cloned Xmen), when you see Magneto. It was a nice big, "I don't like what they did in the other X-books...let me tell you what really happened."
And there's a reason no one referenced X-Treme X-men...it was a horrible, horrible series. Much like his work on Forever, it's all plot and no emotional connection to the characters like the old days. Forever is laughable in its ineptitude (just read the second issue fight with Fabian), and silly characterization.
And yet it is the perfect series for him. He has continued to live int he past for almost ten years. They tried to fix him by giving him Exiles where he couldn't mess anything up and still play with his favorite characters no one else wanted. But that too failed and they did the only thing that made sense...give him a series that lets him do what he was doing all along anyway: live in the past.