Riot is now Element

That's been long overdue and will hopefully help Matrix make inroads into more conservative organizations; I believe the tech is really promising. It's a definite liability, trying to introduce people to Matrix, when the de-facto default client's name evokes all kinds of unhelpful associations – it doesn't sound like work at all and it does sound like gamers, toys, apparently even like a far-left political organisation. Element should be fine for everyone.

Does the name really inhibit adoption in a corporate environment that much, or is it just an excuse people put down in questionnaires?

Plenty of popular tools with questionable names. Splunk and slack comes to mind.

I'd think I'm far from the only one who finds CockroachDB simply repulsive merely for its name.

OT, but I refer to it as RoachDB and that helps a lot.

Roach could be a last name, or a type of chocolate...