It almost implies that at the time, they realized a plethora of languages would emerge but were hoping everyone would stick with their alphabetic convention. Instead, someone skipped straight to S, someone else stepped back to R, and then everyone said screw it and started making up their own funny names & acronyms.

I've read some intriguing things about D, though (which came along more recently, interestingly enough). Apparently it's in production at several large companies.

That creation myth rather falters on the fact that a fair number of languages had already emerged. This was the 1970s, not the 1950s. No-one expected language namers to follow some universal alphabetic convention beginning with BCPL.