SN is asking an old question – can a group break a minhag of their ancestors and later insist that their minhag needs to be respected.
I saw this mocked in a short-term: when a kibutznik asks a RY to send the child home because he is not following minhag of his father. The response – he _is_ following minhag of his father, that is completely rejecting what the father was doing!
One might argue that a couple of hundred years, as SN does, that a couple of hundred years is not much different.