Calling a film by its most commonly understood name when writing something intended for large exposure to the general public is not being a "jackass". It's doing things right.

I agree. There's no other name that points to the correct film as accurately, though my experience in talking to non-fanatics has been that the name isn't all that well recognized. The film doesn't really have a truly common name. "Star Wars" is generally understood to refer to the franchise as a whole as much as the first film. Even if you say "the first one," you often have to qualify that you mean the one from 1977, not the first episode (The Phantom Menace). "A New Hope" as a name was of course supposed to become the film's common name but it never fully caught on. Empire and Jedi's posters both clearly spelled out their episode titles and put "Star Wars" in small letters overhead, but ANH always just kept its original logo treatment on posts and boxes and stuff. If he'd wanted to make it stick, Lucas probably should have rebranded the film more strongly with "A New Hope" from the early 80s on.

Also he probably should have picked a better title than "A New Hope," which isn't very catchy and doesn't do a very good job of explaining what the movie is about since it's the first one and the viewer doesn't really know that hope had been lost and thus why a new hope would be needed, especially considering that the film itself doesn't even do a very good job of establishing just how bad life inside the empire is as compared to however it was before, nor for that matter do the prequels do a good job of showing what life was like before the Empire and how it changed, aside from that all those Jedi who were killed. But let's not digress too far. Can't we get back to annoying Harmy by discussing how yellow Ben's first appearance should be?