I guess I’ll chime in here. So I watched the first couple episodes of OUAT in Wonderland. Didn’t really care for it. So I stopped. As a result, this recast doesn’t bother me one bit. And while many people on here seem to adore OUAT in Wonderland, at the end of the day, it was a one season show that did horribly and got cancelled, regardless of the quality of the show. So it’s not surprising that A&E felt it was ok to recast him. But just because they recast him, doesn’t mean his story from the other show isn’t canon. It’s just like Daario from GoT. Except that to me was worse because it was the same show. Jafar at least was only on the failed spin off show. And I like Naveen as much as the next person, but I thought this new guy did quite well with the part and I’m very intrigued.
Plus this was like the last major, popular villain from Disney that hadn’t appeared on OUAT so I would have been majorly disappointing if they never used him just because he was on the spinoff show, and Naveen wasn’t available.
Also I think I read somewhere that the writers said they need to still get to the Aladdin and Jafar stuff, but that we likely won’t get there til the back half of the season. Which if that’s the case, it sounds like they will play a role towards the end of this season and then be the major focus for the final season next year. Or at least that’s my guess. You don’t just tie Aladdin in with the Savior and introduce an iconic villain and not make them part of the end game. I could easily see a situation similar to season 2 where we are getting smaller story lines in storybrooke for the first half of the season, but then halfway through Jafar makes his way to storybrooke (similarly to Cora).