The homepage copy didn't quite capture me... until I realized it was the new thing by D3's Mike Bostock! Maybe worth name-dropping that somewhere on that page? Though I don't know how many people would respond to that other than myself (hopefully lots of people).
Eh. I respect people more for not namedropping themselves, but maybe I'm alone in this.
(Are you sure it's a good idea to perpetuate the status quo? It's hard to get anyone to pay attention to what you've made unless you're already known. That seems a bit unfair to the next generation, and rather the opposite of oldschool hacker ethos.)
I totally see where you're coming from - name-dropping like that feels really tacky. I'd shy away from that on my own projects.
The challenge is helping people understand what something is and why it is valuable as quickly as possible. In this case, the fact that the team behind this are Mike Bostock (d3), Jeremy Ashkenas (Backbone, CoffeeScript) and Tom MacWright (Mapbox Studio) feels very relevant to getting me excited about the project.
It's such a strong product that I imagine word of mouth (plus how well it demos) will do that job for them though. This was just my first thought on loading up he page in Mobile Safari (and then realizing what it actually was).
Echoing the other commentor, I think the name-dropping provides two important pieces of info:
1) I can match my previous knowledge of related projects to get an idea of what this project is trying to be, and likely have that be accurate.
2) in an age where any random half-baked idea has a polished marketing page and lofty ambitions, it's a noise filter for "these people have completed projects that have actually been used". If anything, on a page that doesn't name-drop, I'd trust a bare-bones, nocss landing page more.
This is a rare case where it seems useful for me to externalize my inner monologue: "Well, this just looks like Jupyter lite... oh, wait, this is Mike Bostock's project? He's built some very cool visualizations and some really powerful libraries with a tasteful API design... if this is his idea of a useful workflow it's probably well thought-out and executed and worth checking out."
