What I'd like to suggest is not to question or criticize a long-honored cultivar without ever having grown it. Sometimes pictures don't do a justice to the real live thing. DC doesn't cost that much these days. Just get it and see why people like it!
As for name recognition, I think that sellers/marketers place more importance on that than buyers. And never before had I even made a connection between DC's name and the Challenger rockets. For me a name is a name is a name. I don't care what it sounds like. That wil never, ever influence me to buy something. I care only how it looks in my garden. Its color, form, and substance. Those are the things I care about. I couldn't care squat about what name a hybridizer chooses to put on a cultivar, except to mark it as different from others in the iris registry.
I have to make only one exception to that: I think it was a mistake to name an iris "Cow Patty." That's my only exception.
