[thingification]

I can understand that as a heuristic.

On the other hand, there are other people who might apply a different heuristic and guess that a project named 'lunatic' is less likely to attract the sort of people who might take, for example, a code of conduct as a tool to beat other contributors about the head. (I'm not saying that's you!)

I guess there are "swings and roundabouts" and peoples' rules of thumb differ, which is perhaps diversity that's all to the good.

[kotxig]

I think brainf*k is a great example of a potentially offensive name that actually conveys meaning and doesn't harm adoption by its intended audience.

[thingification]

To me (without reading any of their stuff, I don't know if this is what they were shooting at), "lunatic" makes me think "high performance" and "this is a very difficult project with high payoff if we succeed, we're a little bit crazy (in a good way) to try, eh?".