The first item sounds like a bug. The Player View code has to jump through a bunch of special hoops, so it's possible that it's not retrieving the name appropriately. I'll flag this to the team, although I'm stunned it hasn't been reported previously, so there may more complexity involved here.
The "public name" is a fundamental part of each topic. Every topic HAS to have a name that can be displayed within the UI everywhere. So the "public name" serves that purpose.
Allowing an arbitrary name to be designated as the ONLY visible name for a topic creates lots of complications within the underlying engine. More importantly, it creates complications for users within the UI. Everything to do with naming now becomes fiddly and confusing in order to handle the extremely rare case like you cited here. And it just doesn't make sense to make everyone pay that price for the special case if there is a reasonable, alternative solution that can be employed.
Fortunately, there IS a simple solution you can employ in this situation. And you've already done it in your post!
The public name of this scruffy ranger can simply be "Scruffy Ranger". Then all the other names become aliases (alternate names) for him, which can all be revealed independently of one another. You can also then designate which one to use as the "true name".
Is this ideal? Nope. But it works quite reasonably.
I've got this issue on our "special cases to improve handling" list, but it will entail a meaningful amount of work to deal with in the underlying engine, plus even more work to solve how to cleanly and smoothly handle this within the UI. So it's competing for resources against all the other things on our ridiculously long "wanted features" list.
Note! For all the armchair quarterbacks out there, it's not overly complicated to simply add this to the UI. What IS complicated is handling all the special situations that can arise in conjunction with this in the UI, and that makes solving this properly a non-trivial effort. As veteran software developers will attest, things that seem hard on the surface are often easy to solve, while things that seem easy are often quite hard. And there's also the old adage that devil is in the details. There are lots of those involved with this situation.
Hope this helps!