I thought the same thing. I like it, but my company's IT director will never allow it. Maybe they want to target the startups and couldn't care less about the old school companies...no idea.
This seems to imply CockroachDB's name would be ignoring/bad marketing? I think it's fine. I see a lot of people saying something along the lines of "if it had a different name I would have looked at it earlier" but honestly I think if it was really named differently with a less remarkable name they would not have noticed it in the first place.
You can see lots of people in this thread alone saying they have an instinctive, visceral negative reaction to the name. If you think that's good marketing, I don't really know what to say...
More so, no large company with Oracle & Postgres & mission critical applications serving the nation will go, let's switch to this cockroach thing...it would have to reach critical mass first