I am all curious about where these names came from.. 
Directly from a list. Devuan picks the names from the
Minor planet names list; see
here.
That page mentions that there
is one reason to use release names (that I was previously unaware of): in .deb packages, using the release name instead of the version number (that would clash across debian-derived distributions), ensures consistent package dependencies.
(Like I've mentioned before, I too do prefer just straight-up version numbers myself. But, when you deal with nontechnical humans,
they tend to fail with the numbers, and do much better if stuff is given names. With .deb packages, using the release name also kinda-sorta defines the distribution, so clashes by mix-matching package sources should be minimized.)
MIMIC windooze just does not help at all.
I don't see windows-mimicking here. Naming versions is a decades-old if not centuries-old practice from science and engineering.
As to the desktops, I really like XFCE and LXDE.
XFCE is very lightweight, fast, and modular, but doesn't have much bling. I like the lack of bling myself.
(
LXDE is similarly lightweight, fast, and modular, and has some optional bling. Mostly, the difference between XFCE and LXDE is in the default apps. In both, you can use Gnome and KDE Plasma applications, too. It's only the menu, dock/taskbar and its special applets, file manager, and utilities, that are specific to your desktop environment, really.)
KDE Plasma is those who feel better using their tools with some designer bling.
Choosing a desktop environment is important, but by no means irreversible. Not that big of a deal, if you change your mind. It is completely possible and normal to have different desktop environments, selectable at login time. It takes some "extra" disk space (libraries and such stuff), but that's about it.
When customizing a desktop environment for a set of users, the choice of which desktop environment works best definitely depends on the users, in my opinion.
In an organization, customizing the look with some proper graphics design (but without sacrificing usability or functionality) seems to work very much like branding in marketing; in my experience, it seems to make it easier for the users to take control of their tools, suggest enhancements, and so on.
In my opinion, the ability to switch desktop environments, and having multiple desktop environments in the first place, is a huge plus; something neither Windows nor Macs really have. The modularity and configurability is exceptional – if we exclude Gnome, which does seem to be travelling in the Windows/Mac "we know better, you don't need to customize anything" direction.
When I customize a new Linux desktop installation for myself, I not only arrange stuff how I like them – like keyboard shortcuts, my custom udev rules for microcontroller development, my browser addons and configuration, my text editor dark custom themes, my custom scripts and utilities in
~/bin/ –, but I also do stuff like set up default page templates in LibreOffice and Inkscape to my own liking. I usually take a lazy day to explore if there is some better stuff I could switch to (like I switched from gedit to pluma), and do all that prep work; but then, even a completely new distro feels like
mine, like slippers that have just moulded to your feet but still "new", not yet ratty from use.
The next desktop I'll build will have two NVMe's (probably Samsung 980 Pros, either 512 GiB or 1 TiB), so that I can have even more fun playing with virtual machines.
The storage speed is absolutely crucial nowadays with respect to the "snappiness" of the system. Even with a weak CPU (or a virtualized CPU limited to a single core), if you have fast enough storage, stuff tends to work acceptably fast. With virtual machines, if you have lots of RAM and fast storage, you don't need much CPU resources to have it respond snappily.
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