Scott from Gel here. I suspect for everyone we talked to in the "So, this is a database for Edge computing?" camp there were a dozen people who thought that and just kept moving even if they were our target audience. It's hard to quantify just what the cost have having a name with such a strong connotation (which has arguably gone up and down in the hype cycle over the lifetime of EdgeDB) has been.

Gel doesn't have any really strong existing computing connotations, so maybe people might make a stretch that it's about some non-computing-related domain and maybe we miss reaching them. But that just seems far less likely than trying to continue to push against the overwhelming feeling that "Edge" just has too much baggage and was working against us.

Personally, I think it's fine if people find the name confounding or just personally dislike it. I think products like Supabase, Neon, Drizzle, CockroachDB, Django, Flask, Express, etc etc kind of prove that if your name is general enough, you'll overcome that reaction eventually via recognition for the value of the product itself.