Honestly I find Blender much more offensive as a term, considering it actually comes up in daily life. I never hear anyone say “gimp”. But in context, neither usually bring up the wrong association for me…

In general I think naming is a vastly overblown issue. If bike shedders had their way, we would never have names as nondescript as Apple or Amazon, or as obscure as Google, yet they are wildly, unreasonably successful.

Gimp’s adoption problem lies elsewhere.

Never heard any of these meanings of "blender", which one comes up for you?

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Blender

So in American English, the term “gimped” refers to someone who has a physical disability, usually affecting the way they walk. This term has largely fallen out of fashion though and isn’t used much anymore unless someone is very deliberately trying to be edgy.

Nowadays in America, if someone over the age of 30 (and many people under the age of 30) hear the word “gimp” or more specifically “the gimp”, their mind immediately flashes back to this scene from the incredibly popular movie Pulp Fiction (this clip is not safe for work and depicts sexual assault) https://youtu.be/PcZUjEWFpKs

If you check the first paragraph of the History section of GIMP’s Wikipedia page, you can see that this is not a coincidence, the creators did in fact name it after the character from that clip: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIMP

So no, I don’t think this is an issue of “any interesting name being too controversial”. There are many places you could draw the line before getting to “let’s name our software after the Gimp from Pulp Fiction”.

I think of the kitchen appliance, not sure where you are going here.