It's because branding is so dashed hard. And because it must capture the soul of the product. Its raison d'etre. That makes it so easy to miss the mark. It's only allotted 100ms of human response time to make a user fall in love.

And I do believe this rebrand is a miss. Nothing about it communicates Go's unique personality. Or deep tradition.

Compare to the incomparable Paula Scher's work at Pentagram. I'll single out the rebrand for MIT Media Lab. About as good as it gets. Mapping perfectly to the myriad bespoke research programs in everything from "affective computing" to "soft robots":

https://www.pentagram.com/work/mit-media-lab/story

In any event, I love that this turned into such a lively discussion here. We should have more of these live critiques. The value of this kind of feedback is amazing ;)