Thing is, the best thing for Bethesda right now would be to come out and say "nothing in the MMO is canon to the series". Use the existing setting and lore and what have you, but make it clear that it's an alternate take on things, nothing in it will effect real TES games, and that the SP TES games will continue as usual.

As far as "they're not giving it a chance", I'm not sure what you expected when it's clear that a large (and vocal) portion of these forums has made it pretty clear in the past that they don't want anything to do with regular multiplayer, much less massive multiplayer. Given that statements from Bethesda have come off the same way, suddenly having this crop up is a pretty sharp slap in the face to a lot of people.

I had interpreted "I don't want Bethesda making an Elder Scrolls MMO" as most of the forums not wanting Bethesda to make an MMO - which is what I also strongly felt - but here we have a separate studio working on this with Beth's advice, so I just don't see the problem. Beth continues making single player games and we also get an MMO, so everyone is happy. If Zenimax Online were going to to butcher the series with this, Bethesda would have said so and the MMO wouldn't have started development.