Dash sounds lame, this is crypto, this is bitcoin, litecoin and darkcoin.
You've just stated exactly why we shouldn't continue with the "*-coin" type of branding. We have transcended the "me too" phase on the technical side, why keep a name that restricts us to limited growth within a closed (and saturated) market of freedom and privacy-loving techies? You need to think beyond "crypto" if you want more adoption.
To quote what I posted yesterday:
...at this point it is more important to get more people using it and start having personal responsibility for their own money. The counter-culture libertarian guys who actively seek out anonymity tech will always read the fine print and understand what it is anyway. As far as marketing is concerned, these are the smart people who we need to worry about LEAST, and their numbers pale in comparison to those of the bank-bound, follow-the-leader masses.
Go back in time eight years and ask someone "Do you have a Gmail or Hotmail address?" Now do the same thing again today... Oh yeah, you can't because only one of those big "~mail" brands survived. Today we can instead ask "Do you have Gmail or Facebook?" Here we have two totally different brands, both of which can serve a similar purpose of connecting people but go about it in different ways.
"What payment do you accept? Bitcoin? Darkcoin? Credit Cards? <--weak, "me-too"
"What payment do you accept? Bitcoin? DASH? Credit Cards? <--see how it has equal footing as the others now?
Darkcoin is ultimately competing with Bitcoin, gold, fiat, etc.--not other altcoins. I think it was CryptoChronic who contributed to a few of the last 50 pages, brandishing his assertion that Darkcoin cannot ever compete with Bitcoin. I think that's the real underlying assertion which stokes this fiery aversion to the name change. He's actually right about one aspect: the name. "Darkcoin" can't compete, but "DASH" can. The DASH proponents are thinking bigger and more long-term, just as the lead developer is.
Another thing people need to remember is that in the end people are going to decide themselves what to call it--we can only nudge them in a particular direction. If our name is Dash, they might call them "D"s or "DA-DAs" or even just "bucks" or "credits." Most of the fiat currencies don't even go by their official names. Ever wonder why the chinese call it yuan? That word just means a unit of money, they hardly say RenMinBi which is "The People's Currency." When Dark/Dash/whateverwecallit takes over as world currency, people in China will stll call it yuan.
Which reminds me, the Chinese mistranslation probably happened because someone decided to use the same first two Chinese characters of the popular Blizzard game title "Diablo" 暗黑破壞神 or literally "Dark Lord of Destruction" instead of the more common way of saying dark "黑暗" like the Chinese movie title of The Dark Knight or the Chinese for "The Dark Ages." That translator probably was more of a gamer or techie and thus imparted his own flare in the word choice. My point is that in translation, people really are going to name it whatever they want. At least with the original English version we decide now, we can have some degree of control over what their initial feelings about the word, and thus their subsequent local naming decisions. With "DASH" there is little chance it can be translated into something dark or demonic.