D&D has lots of great named villains: Strahd (okay, he's basically Dracula), Lord Soth (um, Darth Vader), the Lord of Blades, Orcus, Azathoth, Lolth, Demogorgon, Tiamat, Vecna...
But there's a huge great problem with virtually all of them: they're all high-level foes. Indeed, many are top-level foes and some are even above top-level foes - even 20th level PCs (30th in 4e) can't really hope to defeat these foes.
What that means, in practice, is that players come to a campaign with the cool promise of going up against Strahd (or whoever) and then months later they finally get to do so. Which is probably long after the campaign has started to drag. And that assumes that they get there at all - most campaigns fizzle long before reaching the top levels. Indeed, in 27 years of gaming I've only ever seen one campaign reach 20th level, and that was right at the end of the last session. (Plus two that reached 15th level, one that reached 11th, and a few that reached 9th.)
Basically, D&D has loads of great villains that are all completely useless.
(They frequently get around this by introducing an 'aspect' or 'avatar' of an evil god earlier, or by having a weakened version of the beastie show up earlier. Generally with the caveat that the PCs thus don't get to 'really' kill the villain if they win; all they do is drive him back to his extra-planar home. I'm really not sure that helps, though - is it really that much of a triumph to defeat baby-Tiamat and send her home to think again after months of playing through "Tyranny of Dragons"?)
Basically, what I'm saying is that D&D needs lots more named villains at lower levels. And it really needs to stop boosting the level of every 'iconic' villain every time they go up an edition - these things are meant to be beaten, not put on a shelf to be looked at wistfully.
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