Yes, I do think it's appropriate. Further, this discussion is among the participants of HN -- it isn't for the edification or entertainment of any subjects.

There's a name and namespace collision that is causing enormous ill will. Further, as much as it's a "standard" it's a half-baked standard on most sites, many simply utilizing what people already traditionally did for ASCII decoration.

It doesn't need to be called "Markdown" to justify what they've invested their time in over the last few years. Changing to a non-Markdown name doesn't invalidate their 2-year effort of creating a spec, unit tests and implementation of a human-readable text format that can be rendered as HTML. A name change doesn't change the fundamental and substantial part of their work.