My initial thoughts were womewhat similar. Raku when there's already a Rakudo? I guess the reasoning is that they don't want to impart some special status to Rakudo, but they might as well if it's this close. For the last few years I've actually been of the opinion that if they were ever going to change the name, making it Rakudo would make the most sense. Just make Rakudo the reference implementation of the Rakudo language (the language formerly known as Perl 6), and call it a day.

Actually, the more I think about it, using "Rakudo (the language formerly known as Perl 6)" as a descriptor would probably do the best job encapsulating what it is succinctly. It was a continuation of Perl, but now it's its own thing. As opposed to "Perl 6", which doesn't really convey how radically different it is.

I'm not really one of the "Perl 5 needs to reclaim the Perl 6 name" camp, even though I'm a full time Perl developer and have been for close to two decades. Perl 5 will do what Perl 5's going to do, and freeing up the Perl 6 name won't help all that much with that (it's not like there's enough changes worth making a Perl 7 from, and a purely marketing driven name change would just be laughed at). It might actually be more beneficial to Perl 6.