The name is generally really unfortunate, and I wish they would switch back to KDE for the Desktop Environment (and call the framework Klibs or KDElibs or something).
Many people have positive associations with KDE, but associate Plasma with bloaty QML based desktop widgets from the KDE4 era. If they even associate it with KDE, and not with plasma TVs or blood plasma.
People who know KDE hardly need marketing - they already know what is what and what they want. So they could name it whatever way, I only care about how well does that name integrate in the whole namespace of Linux apps/libs/packages. At the same time, for non-techies or people coming from other OSes Plasma automatically sounds cool, doesn't it?
Nevertheless, as for what I personally feel, I agree - I like KDE better.
Many people have positive associations with KDE, but associate Plasma with bloaty QML based desktop widgets from the KDE4 era. If they even associate it with KDE, and not with plasma TVs or blood plasma.