Angular 1.x was never meant to be an MVC initially. It was mainly for templating then they started adding stuff to it (services, directives, digest cycle, dependency injection...) leading to API bloat

By the time Angular 2 was released, Ember, Vue and React have devoured the market

Unfortunately that is also the case with Angular v2. The API surface is enormous.

what does that have to do with whether or not to completely change the name of the re-write?