I think your work here has something to it. Each one is considered “timeless”, and if they were to change, that might effect their branding for the worst.
This might solidify your conviction:
One thing that I noticed, particularly since I am currently doing some “eye studies” in art, is that the blue dot effectively becomes the eye grabbing feature. The logo lends itself very well to the concept of the “Golden Ratio”, the same attributed to any decent art, and to the human eye. Soo too, sharp lines on the top of the text all point inward to itself, directing the viewership to itself.
Without the dot you have no “pupil” to focus on, and with rounded text edges you have no “arms” to embrace the viewers eye. As a silly example, you cannot embrace anyone with closed arms, but with open arms- so too the smooth font and the pupiless logo seem to deflect one’s attention.
Like it or not, the fact that the current “brand” is causing this discussing means that it is doing its job, which is: to be noticed and talked about, and to invoke strong feeling of some sort. As one saying goes “any attention is good attention”. The proposed one looks like a conversation stopper, and that, in my opinion, would not be a good thing.
Lasty, looking at @kynu’s icon, it has the same eye grabbing features that blender does. It has a larger contrast of colour than blender’s logo, but I also notice that it draws my eye in more than many other icons. It too takes on the shape of an eye. If we too remove the pink outside, and the “shine” from the eye, we almost have blender’s logo.
As a thought experiment, if we took out the pupil, the pink outside, and the white shine, we would have the same desired simplification suggested for Blender’s logo. But now we get a rather bland orange circle. I like Kynu’s eye grabbing icon for the same reason I like Blender’s eye grabbing logo and text as explained above. I propose that neither Kynu nor Blender rebrand themselves, otherwise both would have bland icons.