I'll start by saying the names are are largely subjective and based on people's whims. I've been in the hobby since the 90's and back then nothing was branded or named. However, you also didn't see quite the same amount of extraordinary colored corals (across the board... not just with zoas). You simply had 'graded' colonies that came in. In the last decade or so a garden industry has sprung up around 'branding' and 'releasing' zoas. The naming came about because you needed someway to describe what you're looking at. People in the industry, able to get choice rocks from wholesalers, started naming stuff and then branding it.
Here's where it gets silly. Name recognition goes a long way. OG Krakatos were short lived in captivity and to my knowledge they haven't found another patch of them out there in the ocean. However, people started spinning off speckled Kraks, pink kraks, krak gods etc... none of these really having any physiological similarity or connection with another. So people do that and then they start using each other's names... vw bloodshots and jf bloodshots are two completely different things. Some people, like cb rebrand stuff at a whim and charge and arm and a leg. Here we are now where its a mess and people just name stuff, throw a number on it, and see if they can get someone else to buy in.
To me naming conventions are pretty straight forward. If something has a distinguishing characteristic, like a rasta, then go ahead and call it a rasta. If it doesn't then it can often go in one of the 'buckets' I mentioned before. 70% of ID requests in the forum are either watermelons, eagle eyes, fire and ice, or one of the other several generic labels. All of this is of course accounting for variances in appearance due to tank params, lighting conditions, etc.
What about stuff that truly is special? Well, when you buy a named zoa at a premium you're making a good faith covenant with the seller, assuming they're not the 'originator,' that you're getting something 'lineaged' back to the person that introduced it. I'll add the caveat that no zoa exists solely in a 2' x 2' section of the ocean... so no one has a monopoly on anyone strain but ID's and names generally SHOULD default to the person that brought the strain to the attention of others. Speaking on behalf of collectors now (or even casual zoa enthusiasts), our job is to cut through the bull$hit and do our best to correctly ID the stuff we pass on to our fellow hobbyists.
