Personally, I tend to agree, and I hate the name "witness" (in fact, I was just discussing recently with other witnesses how bad the name is, and problems that have resulted from that choice for the name of block producers).
Generally, I prefer descriptive names and I also dislike acronyms precisely because I think they are not very descriptive. But it's not my decision to make, and I can understand that the use of the term DAO might appeal to one of the primary demographics for investment in Steem (existing cryptocurrency holders).
But I also think that Steem is one of the few coins that has a lot of appeal outside that market, so there's a better argument with Steem for choosing a descriptive name over one that "sells the best" to crypto people.
Yeah DAO may not be my biggest worry it's just kind of the straw that broke the camels back. It's just such a worrying and ongoing trend that steem development has not thought of end users and supposedly just thinks of developers or crypto people (not like developers woudn't also understand intuitive terminology as well) ... add to it that crypto people don't know what the heck they're doing either. They can't get substantial usage of their supposedly genius apps among hundreds of blockchains so I worry about appealing to them because they're doing something wrong and I think it's in part the way they communicate.
In any case we'll work around things ... i'm guessing there will be an open sort of way to interface with this proposal system? If so SteemPeak will try to add it in as a tool and hopefully it seems intuitive to users regardless of the non-intuitive name.
Yes, there'll be a relatively simple API for getting a list of the proposals, vote counts, etc and allow voting.
The UI will be under your control, of course, but if you've got a UI for witness voting, you can probably start with that one.
As far far as the name goes, I'd recommend adding a short paragraph on your UI that describes what it's about.