Oh my me too. Every time I come across the concept, I get bothered and feel like I must have missed a core concept of it, as the naming never made any amount of sense for me.

For some reason, this truly brings me some amount of peace. Both that the name was applied for non-obvious reasons, and that I'm not the only one to find the name misfitting.

I am genuinely happy to bring you thus tiny closure, friend

You really did! I never would have thought to check out the history behind it. Would have remained confused if not for you. Thanks!

Oh I wish I'd learned this last year when I had a Dynamic Programming module in Systems' Biology course. The name never particularly made sense to me, and seemed like memoizing was the core principle -- which is definitely smart, but I didn't see a reason how it was dynamic. :)

Me to. It's such a vague general purpose complement you could apply to anything, like "elegant programming" or "usefulness oriented". And it turns out that was just why it was chosen!