I asked ChatGPT what a top quark can decay into. Among other things it suggested a top quark could decay into a photon. ChatGPT seems not to have learned about baryon number conservation...
On a more serious note, Pythia has been around for 40 years... surely they could have picked a better name...
I asked ChatGPT (GPT-4) model about the top quark decay channels and it was mostly correct about top decay to W and b quark. It then started listing possibilities of further W decays which were mostly correct.
On your same serious note, particle physicists are the worst in naming things, let's not forget that people came up with a very unique name of "ROOT".
It's quite convenient to have a continuous range of model sizes. Usually I want "the largest model that fits on my GPU", but sometimes I want to trade between quality and performance, and Pythia makes that easy.
A high energy physics simulation library