Sal is my second Orlando is my guy but there both pretty grate it was hard to choose just one.

Making future writing easier was a happy upside to this change. 

The main thing that stood out in terms of feedback about the want of Dave being canonized and unchangeable stemmed mostly from how he responds to things, the fact that his dad's death is a very big thing for his character arc, and that he explicitly appears as himself in CGs. Not only that, but the first line of the itchio description says "You are Dave". 

You were never the MC, and the input name thing was a relic from early development where that was the expectation. The more Dave became his own character, the more people explicitly spoke up about how he should be his own person. It got to the point I had the feedback and enough of a compelling argument that I made the change.