The people outside of this community who I've spoken to about timeattacks haven't been confused either.
Can you provide some links to forum topics? How did they know what a timeattack is? Is it only because they read your website? What about people who haven't read your website (which is most people)? How are they supposed to know?
Although I don't currently think that anything is wrong with 'timeattack.'
How many times do I have to explain that? It's bad because it's too similar to "time attack", and as someone already mentioned, 99.9% of people consider timeattacks and time attacks to be the same thing and won't realize that when you say "timeattack" that it means something different from what they've always thought of as a "time attack".
No one wants to post times they got in the time attack mode of a game and have to worry about people thinking they used save states. People shouldn't have to stop using the word time attack just because you decide that the terminology for different kinds of runs should be made needlessly more confusing. No one wants to have to ask whether or not save states were used every time someone says they did a time attack for a game.
Whether you like it or not, people
have been confused about what a timeattack is. This isn't something that just happens occasionally, I've personally seen hundreds of instances where people didn't realize that a timeattack was made using save states, and that's just topics that I've read. In fact, many thousands of people have been fooled by the word time attack, just take Morimoto's SMB3 vid as an example, and don't give me the argument that if it said timeattack then people wouldn't have been fooled since your clever idea of removing the space didn't come until much later. Actually I just checked archive.org and the old copies of your website did call it a "time attack". Why would they be confused by the term "time attack" you might ask? Because, as I've already said so many times, time attack has never meant that save states were used. Morimoto used the word time attack because that's just what many people call speedruns. He just didn't mention for some reason what kind of time attack it was, which would be a save state time attack or a tool assisted time attack.
Also I should mention that whether you like it or not, people
have complained about people referring to save state runs as time attacks, and I don't blame them. As in the previous paragraph, not just a few, but
thousands of people have complained. Why is that? Are they all trolls? No, it's because it really is misleading, and the fact that so many people are complaining is proof that it's misleading.
Tool-assisted' just sounds so ridiculous and uncool.
In your opinion. Lots of other people like the term, and also the
Doom tool assisted community apparently likes the term.
Like calling a powerboat a tool-assisted boat.
Again you provide a poor analogy. Here's a better one: If the term for a boat with an engine or motor was "power boat" and you decided to start using the word "powerboat" to describe a sailboat or a rowboat, then that's misleading.
If the movies had a cooler name like 'dreamruns' or something, then I wouldn't mind so much switching to that.
So this is just about sounding cool? Then how about calling then "continuous single segment speedruns" so people think you have lots of gaming skill. It's not about sounding cool, it's about being clear and informative.