AITA for refusing to apologize for calling my company's product mediocre?

We recently had a huge company-wide meeting. Different departments talked about their successes and achievements. That included the head of product who talked about all the things they'd accomplished and then our CEO gave a speech afterwards. He was pumped up and told us to keep up the hard work to make sure our product remains the *best* in the field. I'm a software engineer and I'm pretty passionate about my job, I love doing it well and usually go above and beyond for it.<br><br>So I commented that we should really stop saying this product is the *best* when in reality it's just average and / or mediocre. I believe that when you call something the best, you have to be willing to put your money where your mouth is and make it the best. If we don't plan on doing that, we should stop calling it that. Also, calling something the best when it's not is so cringe and *so* douchy. I hate it. <br><br>The meeting ended and one of my coworkers immediately came up to me and told me I was a jackass for making that comment. My response was that I also wasn't going to apologize for telling the truth and that my comment wasn't meant maliciously, but rather meant to get us to be more honest about our product and see where we can improve it. <br><br>I didn't think too much of it, but after work I received an email from our CEO saying that he'd gotten several complaints on my very last comment and asking me to apologize. I responded by basically reiterating what I told my coworker and got a rather nasty reply from him saying that I was being unprofessional, immature and that I shouldn't have called the product mediocre when it pays all my bills, the bills of my family and myself. I was also told that if I continued to behave this way there would be consequences and that I had until EOD to send an apology email to the entire team.<br><br>So I wrote him back basically reiterating what I said before and said I wasn't going to apologize. He could fire me for not sending an apology but I wasn't going to send one. I've been with this company for 5 years, I consistently get excellent performance reviews and I'm pretty sure my CEO is aware that I'd be very hard to replace without a hit to the company, so I highly doubt he'll actually fire me. I did however ask him to define unprofessional behavior because I had the impression that the very definition of unprofessional behavior was to be calling something the *best* when it very clearly was not. I'd also like to point out the initial comment I made was NOT to insult the product team. I'm not trying to make anyone look bad, I'm trying to get everyone to see things for how they really are and to stop hyping this product so much.<br><br>I thought that was it but now I'm getting emails and messages from coworkers I've never talked to, from people in other departments, telling me I'm a jackass and a complete asshole for making that comment. Some people have apologized and said they thought the product was mediocre too but they didn't think it was appropriate to say so. I'm really not sure if I'm the asshole in all of this but it's getting kind of stressful.