In short, Yes.
"The answer to this is very simple," Adams said. "It was a joke. It had to be a number, an ordinary, smallish number, and I chose that one. Binary representations, base 13, Tibetan monks are all complete nonsense. I sat on my desk, stared in to the garden and thought 42 will do. I typed it out. End of story."
42: THE ANSWER TO LIFE, THE UNIVERSE AND EVERYTHING - The Independent
All of the clever theories come up with over the years are nothing more than the human desire to find patterns where none exist, and come up with understandable explanations of inexplicable incidents.
Add to this the fact that Adams would regularly contradict himself from book to book. Not deliberately, he just never kept track of things, and often came up with new, better ideas, and didn't let what he'd done before restrain him.