Would you want someone who steps up and does a lot of work in a project you started to suddenly tell you that he/she will now change the vision of the project and turn it in ways you don’t like?
Let’s assume that you take your time to write clean code, do changes slowly and deliberately and think long about how to do something right before you start coding. Then someone steps up and does lots of cool things in a flurry of activity, but does not do them right and you already see the maintenance fallout from that approaching. Would you want that contributor to take over the project and use the name you established for this new kind of project?
As a non-programming example: I’m writing a roleplaying system, and it took me several years to get from EWS-2.6 to having the concepts for EWS-3.0 nailed down — though without having finished text. If someone came in and did lots of work, I would still not want to see an EWS-3.0 which violates core principles I set down for the system. People are free to do that, but they have to do that in their own space, not in the space I created.
Also changing the name all over the source code in the main version tracking repository is a pretty hostile step. It implies that the other one now considers the project his/her own.
Essentially Benno should have made a bano, but I think that just turning GNU nano into his own project isn’t OK.