"dom-sub" makes a lot of sense, honestly; catch me using that in my next project. I would object to "torturer-victim" because it doesn't properly describe the relationship.
The deal killers being that it's less readable due to the lack of established usage and that it doesn't define the relationship as clearly as master/slave. It feels like "dominant" might imply that it has authority in most cases, but not every case.
>And is your project a popular open-source project?
Yeah I'm Linus lol.