Flash Sideways
Ok, so I'm trying to reconcile the flash-sideways with the island time and think I may have something. Now it's been established throughout the series and in the flash sideways that each of the main characters has a distinguishing trait that informs their choices:

The Year in Metal!
Because that's what I was listening to my senior year of high school*:

Opeth release "My Arms your Hearse" which includes fan favorite "Demon of the Fall"

Just making a literary flourish with the soul killing thing, not really serious…

Unfortunately these songs never really go away…
They live on and on and on in bars and Karaoke clubs around the world. In my hometown (Bayside, Queens Bitches!) I hear many of these songs all the time, without any irony but with a lot of nostalgia.

I'm sure trade-marking was a big part of it, but in numerous press releases Syfy indicted that the name change was due in part to a desire to appeal to a larger demographic; a demographic who may be turned off by the genre associations of the name Sci-Fi. It was a conscious decision not to align themselves with…

You can't cure ugly
I love how these channels think that just changing their logo will drastically improve their ratings demographics (I'm looking at you Syfy!)