Then, when the announcement of the name change is on the HN frontpage, tens of HNers will post their anger "the name was already well-known, this is a marketing disaster!! They should know better!"

Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

Yes but those people would be wrong in this case.

I don't think it's highly damaging. It's an acronym. Is BBC's name highly damaging?

BBC isn't a great comparison - it's an initialism, not read or said as a word.

I can't think of an acronym example though.

And the embarrassing meaning that some might attribute to "BBC" is also an initialism.

Why would it be? I can't think of a single meaning of BBC which translates to an insult. GIMP on the other hand has more than one meanings as an insult (not even an acronym).

Try this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_(sexual_slang)

Definitely came after the original BBC being established, and definitely is orders of magnitude less known than the sexual slang variant. So yeah, the Gimp comparison doesn't stand, at all.

Uhhh BBC also stands for something else, and that second meaning is a very common term on the internet.

Describing one’s … favourite desert? (HN is American so not sure we can say the word here) doesn’t constitute an insult - people say it all the time irl. But you’re also right that BBC wouldn’t be a good name for a design tool either.

Naming things is hard, someone should setup a focus group :)

Are you thinking of the Coventry University Netball Team? (again).

You're laughing but when I worked on a search engine, it was a serious question which videos should we display if the search query is just "BBC".

The prudent approach prevailed for a hundred different reasons but online user metrics weren't one of them. Apparently people were not very fond of the British Broadcasting Corporation, especially outside of the angloshpere.

From what I gather, the people running the project don't mind the name, and that is basically to what this boils down to. I too think it's a stupid name, and that the project would be better off with a rename, but if being less "idiotic" or whatever is not the project goal, then they are no so idiotic after all, no? Idiotic would be to self-sabotage with the name, like failure to get into app stores because of policy or something, and still not changing the name, or trying to fight the perception of "gimp" as a word, or anything like that. But overall, I think situation is settled and the people running the show are consistent.