How strong should an engine be with various features implemented?

[jmcd]

Best names for an engine are quirky and unassuming,
witness: Stockfish, Fruit, Yace, Fizbo, Booot, Arasan, Gull.

I'm big into fishing so a fish reference will be mandatory

[jmcd]

Don't use a tree when you can use a hash, aim for good big-O properties but ONLY AFTER you have correct code and you have verified that the code you are trying to improve is the bottleneck with a profiler.

This is what I needed to hear. I think I've spent a bit too much time obsessing over things that don't actually help the engine at all in the long term, when performance is being bottlenecked in unrelated areas. I'll have some time to do some big restructuring in a week or two, and I will try to add some comments and change the quirks of my code to match what is standard. After looking through stockfish and some other programs, I've noticed that there is a general precedent for how components are named across different engines which I have not followed, and I know that many of the things I have written would be downright misleading for somebody who knows what most chess engines look like.

[Henk]

Good names for chess engines are names like nightmare, deathwish or heroin.

Nightmare and Knightmare both already exist.
Deathwish if a good name if you start a new chess engine in C in 2020

(Just kidding )

If it uses bitboards and programmer starts debugging one can call it Deathwish II

Or Fortyyearsafter. Only good time to start developing a new chess engine was 1980 or so.

[Dann Corbit]

Best names for an engine are quirky and unassuming,
witness: Stockfish, Fruit, Yace, Fizbo, Booot, Arasan, Gull.

I'm big into fishing so a fish reference will be mandatory

And the best logo of all time was the planetary cheese balls of Andscacs. Velociraptor skeleton for raptor was cool too, but cheese balls is definitely #1. I cheered for Andscacs the whole tournament.