In my opinion the rebranding of antshares was a very important step it getting greater adopted.
It's hard to take a currency serious as long as it sounds like a children's game.
For my taste NEO is not necessarily the best name choise, but at least far better than antshares.
NEO is a terrible choice for a name in cryptocurrency as it's tarnished by NEO & BEE which ran off with their investors money.