Reviving this thread; new idea on implementation.
You were worried that mods would conflict; here's how to allow them to co-exist. For each display format, however many you want there to be, define a system default for each one in the form of a C-style formatting string (token-matching). Every ship that does not explicitly override this would simply use the system default formatting strings for each format type.
However, whenever a ship is actually instantiated, have the ability to provide a configuration object defining overrides for the enumerated system default formats. That way, no memory is wasted unnecessarily (flyweight pattern), and every individual ship can have an interesting and unique name display if the ship is special. I could see this being used for mission flag ships and such, or even "alien" ships that within the fiction of the universe make no distinction of class or variant etc, making them seem even more alien.
And yes my motivation is still SC2