(Are you sure it's a good idea to perpetuate the status quo? It's hard to get anyone to pay attention to what you've made unless you're already known. That seems a bit unfair to the next generation, and rather the opposite of oldschool hacker ethos.)
The challenge is helping people understand what something is and why it is valuable as quickly as possible. In this case, the fact that the team behind this are Mike Bostock (d3), Jeremy Ashkenas (Backbone, CoffeeScript) and Tom MacWright (Mapbox Studio) feels very relevant to getting me excited about the project.
It's such a strong product that I imagine word of mouth (plus how well it demos) will do that job for them though. This was just my first thought on loading up he page in Mobile Safari (and then realizing what it actually was).
1) I can match my previous knowledge of related projects to get an idea of what this project is trying to be, and likely have that be accurate.
2) in an age where any random half-baked idea has a polished marketing page and lofty ambitions, it's a noise filter for "these people have completed projects that have actually been used". If anything, on a page that doesn't name-drop, I'd trust a bare-bones, nocss landing page more.