Having a female and minority with a male name as "the" lead character for a flagship series is already a major step.
Is it?
How to Get Away with Murder and
Jane the Virgin are both current shows with minority female leads, and I'm not sure there's really a stigma/prejudice to overcome with odd name choices. It might be a first for
Star Trek, but women of colour are no stranger to lead roles (albeit not nearly
enough lead roles so I still fully applaud the casting). A trans lead on a major show? Now
that would be a step forward. Not that I remotely think that's what's happening here, Fuller just loves to give female leads boy's names.
SGU wasn't bad because it was "rawer and grittier", it was bad because it was slow paced and had boring storytelling. Also the characters weren't very likeable. I liked BSG, I adore DS9 and I hope DSC will be "rawer and grittier", while also staying inside the established realms of Star Trek regarding Canon (not design-wise, just pimp it up) & philosophy. The story being dark, doesn't mean, that the vision of the future can't be generally positive. Bad things do happen to good people...
Agreed, SGU's problem wasn't the darker tones. SG-1 had some pretty intense and grown-up moments at times. In its first season it had a plotline about a girl who was going to be an unwilling suicide bomber after her whole planet was wiped out by a plague, that's pretty dark. The problem with SGU was that it had no idea what it wanted to be about, most of the characters were either horrible or 'meh' and by the time it settled down and got going, it was too late, the audience were gone.
There's not much evidence that they do.
They have tried to do research into this and while some studies have pointed to effects (both 'positive' and 'negative') of having unusual names, the overall picture is that it either makes no difference at all, or any difference it makes is completely swamped by the effect of having the sort of parent who would call you Hitler McHitlerface in the first place. Ultimately a child's name is not going to be a major influence in itself. And as my wife will attest, having a traditionally male name can provide advantages at overcoming sexist assumptions.
More interestingly, there is a class link to names in the UK, which raises questions about whether certain names make people think of you as a certain class and therefore attribute you a certain level of social or financial success, and whether what we are seeing is correlation or causation.
