Now if we're going to talk names, CockroachDB is the one with the problem. I'm very interested in the project and follow it closely, but going to my senior management and saying "we're going to bank the company on Cockroach!" is going to be a really tough sell.
You've got a good point here. Before actually using the product I thought the name was really gimmicky. Despite that, I had a fairly positive experience with RethinkDB. Their documentation was great and changefeeds were a great feature for what I was doing at the time.
I think you guys introduced friction very early on with some of the developers, because of your name. Given the context of our times where many of the devs joke around about "yet another 'revolutionary' database that claims to be different and then does the same thing, but dropping some crucial functionality" (for which I primarily blame MongoDB), "RethinkDB" can be considered a bit of a sardonic name. It can also read as "we need to reject the notions other databases are built on and rethink it all", which to more conservative devs can feel as an attack on decades of thought and design around their beloved MySQL and PostgreSQL.
Basically, I think this name might actively discourage developers from adopting your db or at least playing around with it.