Do you eschew Constellation names as well, and only refer to targets by their RA and Dec to navigate around the night sky?
What about the planets - do you like looking at Sol 6, or Saturn?
Seriously, I think having distinct "common names" for large "collections" of similar or related objects makes it a lot easier to recall the attributes of the objects, even if those names have no rational linkage to the object in question.
It's a fair bet that one of Neil Armstrong's distant ancestors was a physically powerful man, but that isn't what we remember Neil for. And when it comes to DSOs in a small telescope - if we tried to give them a meaningful name based on what you can actually see, we would just end up with a list of entries like "Very Faint Fuzzy Object No. xxx" - but "Running Chicken Nebula" will help me remember where I need to look, and what to look for, far more than IC 2948 or C 100 or RCW 62
I think most people only have a capacity to recall a very small selection of numbered items on a list (particularly when you are dealing with 3-, 4- and even 5-digit numbers), but we can remember much more detail from a much longer list of named objects.
"PGC 17223? What's that? Oh! You mean the Large Magellanic Cloud? It's right over there!"
