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I don't think anyone wants to take credit away from Gruber. My understanding is that they want to move the language forward. More people than just Gruber use it now. I haven't been following him much recently, but for a long time his attitude was, basically, "You can't change anything without my approval but I'm not going to invest any time in this." The way he has handled Markdown's success over the last few years has not engendered my respect.

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Why is it important that the new thing have the old name?

Reducing user confusion is one possible answer, but I expect if you are going to argue that, you end up with the name not mattering because most of the users aren't even aware of it.

People are definitely aware of the name. It would be a complete non-starter to have a name that didn't reference "markdown" in some way when the project is an effort to standardise markdown.

There are certainly a large number of people that are aware of the name, I'm not disputing that.

My point is that there are tens of millions of redditors that aren't. I would also guess most light users of Stack Exchange sites are not very aware of the name.

For all those people, I don't think the name matters. Also, the heavier, more interested users will likely not be disrupted much by a different name.

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