Another factor that makes people not want to play halflings is that many have had bad experiences with halfling players; the kender of DL, in particular, rubbed many the wrong way when their players stole from party members. Likewise, WoW Gnomes have that sort of past history with many players, because of lowbie ganking (high percentage of gnomes involved here) and a tendency to annoy same-faction players via irritating requests and other habits. So it develops to a specific hatred of many ON BOTH SIDES that may be causing a confounding effect. This leads many Horde players (or even Alliance players with high level Horde alts) to have a "Kill on Sight" rule for gnomes, in that they'll try to kill a gnome for BEING a gnome, unless that gnome has significant numbers of allies making the chances of success minimal, even if they don't normally tend to kill Alliance on sight.
So I don't favor renaming to kender, because it will likely trigger bad memories in the D&D oldtimers and those who've read a lot of Dragonlance, while it will put off newbies, and probably create a similar effect. However, given that the halflings have been moving to being more kender-esque across editions, the 4th ed. incarnation looks to be somewhat of a compromise; there appears to be an element of "how do we bring in the good elements of LotR halflings, while also making them more likely adventurers ala kender and keeping the more positive aspects of their design?" Nomadic halflings make sense, as the traditional perceptions of many nomadic peoples are that they are somewhat rogueish, (a feature of halflings since 1st ed. and also common of kender) yet rarely steal from friends and family (thus removing the main annoyance behind kender for many players) and are likely to be interested in creature comforts (a feature of old-style hobbit-esque halflings) so the overall design of a nomadic culture is an appropriate adaptation, and it provides a simple reason for why some decide to become adventurers and why few would take significant notice. As far as making them good boatsmen and river traders, rivers have historically been major 'roads' for goods and traders in our world, and housebarges both offer a lot of space for living and for cargo, thus being one of the forms of mobile housing most well suited to providing creature comforts.