The fact that it has been coined by some academics in their research papers is not in contradiction with the fact that it has been chosen exactly like any marketing term, to imply that something is better than it really is.

The alternative term "optimistic access" describes much better the essence of those algorithms, while "lock free" attempts to hide their nature and to make them look like something that is guaranteed to be better (so receiving money for researching them is justified), because locks are supposed to be bad.

"Lock free" and "wait free" have been buzzwords that have provided subjects for a huge number of research papers in the academia, most of which have been useless in practice, because the described algorithms have been frequently worse than the lock-based algorithms that they were supposed to replace.

I don't agree with your characterization of these algorithms as "worse".

They have a desirable property. If you needed a wait-free algorithm, and this is a wait-free algorithm it's not "worse" for you than an existing algorithm that isn't wait-free, regardless of whether it's slower, or more memory intensive or whatever. You needed wait-free and this is wait free.

Why is wait-free desirable? Well, unlike a lock-free algorithm, the wait-free algorithm makes progress in defined time for everybody and it might be that it's actually much worse if anybody is stalled than for the averages to be bad for example.

If you mean "fast on average" say that. If you mean (as often C++ programmer do) "Validates my feeling of self-worth" then say that. I don't know whether anybody wants to pay you more money to validate your self-worth, but at least you're being honest about your priorities.