This is a great point, Charlie. I hadn't really ever thought of common names as a reflection of local culture, though I of course knew that many varied by region. There are definitely some colourful names, and often descriptive.
I agree that there is value and interest in maintaining all of a species' common names, to reflect and preserve its cultural history. And perhaps regionally people could use whichever they prefer. However, I think this starts to create problems when it comes to citizen science. Professionals with biological training understand the scientific nomenclature and how to track changes there and are comfortable using that as a primary reference. But the average nature-watcher, while aware of scientific names, probably doesn't use them much. I could give you only a handful of scientific names for birds, for instance (Tyrranus tyrranus! Troglodytes troglodytes! So helpful when they repeat themselves). But that's not a problem, because in North America we have one set of standardized names, so when I tell you Eastern Kingbird, you know exactly which species I mean.
This is not so much the case for others with many names. The issue was really driven home for me in working on these two field guides. In the species accounts we include host plant info, and most of the time we use common names because they're more immediately recognizable than Latin (also shorter). But with so many names for things, which one do we choose to use? Related, what about when the same name is used for multiple species? A particular bugbear is the species group that includes hop-hornbeam, hornbeam and ironwood. I can tie my brain in knots trying to sort those out.
Also, we drew our host plant info from multiple sources and some might use one name while others used another. When we weren't familiar with the plant in question and didn't recognize the names, we would sometimes inadvertently use two different names in the text. Our copyeditor had the job of combing through the accounts and finding all the spots where we'd done that. Then she'd send me the list and ask which one we wanted to use. I usually went with what the USDA plants database, or otherwise what the general consensus of Google was amongst its search results.
I was uploading a bunch of my moth pics from this spring the other evening and tried to label Grieving Woodling. No such species came up in the iNat results. I knew it was a species of Egira, though couldn't remember the specific name, so I searched that, but none of those looked right either. I finally had to google the darn thing to get the species name. Turns out in the iNat database it's called Lined Black Aspen?? Never heard that name. The front-page image for the species is incredibly pale, much more than any we get around here, so I didn't recognize it when browsing the results for Egira.
So, tl;dr - I think preserving the regional variation in names is important, but I think for the purposes of citizen science it would be useful to try to have a single set of names that would make it easier for people to learn species and record and submit data. Whose names do we choose? Worth discussion, but I feel field guides, the things citizen scientists will be using when making their identifications, should be among the frontrunners.
Good conversation on this topic!