I have to share a question as a native speaker of the Greek language; Do those who renamed Gastraphetes to Gastraphetoros have to show any ancient text or grammar source, in which this word appears? For sure, this word doesn’t appear in weapon’s description in Heron’s of Alexandria 1st century work “Belopoeica”, as I have checked in the original text (in Greek Wikisource of Wikimedia Foundation).
Note: I know about the trend of correcting unit names that previously were the weapon’s name instead of the weapon user’s name, but this correction is not correct.
Grammatically, and supposing that it happened I’m unaware of the existence of this word, at best Gastraphetoros sounds like genitive singular in the ears of Greek speaker (i.e. indicative of being a possessor of another noun - sample case words in English: 's or of (the) ) and not as nominative singular, as every unit name is… while at worst, the word doesn’t even exist (which is the case in my opinion, as I have also searched for its existence in multiple places - i.e. in the original text, in a specialized dictionary of The University of Chicago, and in Google: zero results in Greek script of the word, and zero results independent to aoe2 in Latin script before the year 2024 when the renaming occurred).
Otherwise, in which other language -oros is a suffix that denotes the user of an object? As far as I know neither in English.
The old name Gastraphetes (an anglicized Greek word, which is the bow’s name without a doubt) literally means “belly-releaser” in Greek, not “belly-bow” as in-game help section says; and only bow’s user does have a belly - I mean this could be a case of an acceptable weapon’s name as user’s name.
In case you’re curious; it’s not easy to say how the user of the weapon was being called. My assessment is that we simply don’t know. It’s not mentioned in the original text of the description of the weapon, nor anywhere else as far as I have concluded. They could have been called Gasters (lit. Bellies) - as a slangy expression, or anything.
Therefore, if nobody knows, or if nobody can provide a source that shows the word Gastraphetoros in use, I request for a correction of it, back to original Gastraphetes. Better sooner than later they say.
PS: Gastraphetoros is also going to appear in the upcoming aoe2de DLC “Chronicles: Battle for Greece”, which will be a dispersion of a mistake. It will be like having “Arbalestoros”, and letting people read & discuss of something mistaken in perpetuum.