Are you.......are you giving them programming lessons?
Not lessons, suggestions that is the point of evaluating the beta. I've been an analyst programmer for 21 years professionally, but I started programming in machine language, assembly & Basic when I was a kid during the 1980's so I've some experience. I mostly do work on billing systems, data conversions and dot.net. So my suggestions tend to be expressed both from a user's perspective who has used many software interfaces over the years and from a programmer's point of view.
There is no need to get offended on behalf of the team that designed the product.
I think it's better to point something out with a possible solution than just complain no ?
I looked in the \My Games\GalCiv3\Designs directory and I do not have the short names active, all my ships have a serial number. So it must be something else.
I also noticed that when two design exist with the same name, one based on the other, that one of the two ships will not have a graphic representing it in the designer list.
I will try to replicate the problem the next time I play, and will take note of the file names generated after saving both ships.