I remember I posted in this thread, it's good info and could use a bump while I reply to some things I've been putting off.
Well you could easily do that like The Mario Team, The Zelda Team, The Odd Ball Team, etc, but it would be well a little boring.
I think that they could be a bit more creative than that and not feel a need to name themselves after their primary franchises, but more in regards to their design philosophy.
I'm not quite sure what you suggest? Renaming EAD and SPD? Renaming the departments within EAD and SPD? What would that improve, exactly? Also, especially on EAD's side, the departments are mainly an organizational thing - there are no real fixed teams to begin with, staff is constantly switching departments on a per-project basis.
Each group in SPD and EAD quite obviously has a core group within it that rarely if ever changes. Aonuma isn't suddenly going to be leaving EAD Software Development Group 3 and Hisashi Nogami will stick with Group 2, for example. Katsuya Eguchi is deputy manager of the entire EAD group and he still gravitates to his particular core group. If anyone leaves, I could see it being to create a new software grouping within Nintendo. I imagine that the younger employees on Splatoon might work their way into leading their own team within EAD some day.
The primary reasons I see this as beneficial are comprehensive.
At best, "EAD Software Development Group 3" is almost always referred to as "the Zelda team" by anyone outside of Nintendo's walls, if someone even makes the distinction at all. They could easily just be lumped together as "EAD" as a whole, or just "Nintendo". I feel like a lack of naming these teams gives them a lack of identity, that their unique takes on design philosophy get lost in obscurity.
Look at EAD Tokyo, for example. For a while, they were a single team, but EVERYONE on GAF knew the team, who it was composed of and what they were capable of. They had an identity - a brand, if you will - and GAF (and to a lesser extent the rest of the internet) latched onto it HARD. They WANTED to identify something inside the nebulous mess of clinical group naming that no one ever remembers outside of Shikamaru and a few others.
The result? For a while, every game Nintendo made "should be made by EAD Tokyo". And you see this pattern a lot. When people say they want a franchise entry made, who do they always pick to make it? The teams that have distinct names and identities. Retro Studios, Intelligent Systems, Monolith Software, etc... not EAD Group 4. So not only is the identity of the group lost, but it also strips them of individual talent recognition, as well. Maybe Miyamoto wouldn't need to do so many interviews if people knew who else they might want to talk to.
Also, even in this best case scenario of an EAD group being called "the Zelda team" or "the Mario Kart team" to at least differentiate them, you can't help but feel that it pigeon-holes them slightly, that they are identified by existing franchises. I'm not going to say that it informs their decision to iterate on existing IP, but when that's how they are identified, what do you think fans and the press expect of them?
There are benefits to unique nomenclature for every team. Sega had a good idea giving their teams names, but screwed it up by making them separate 2nd-party development studios, full of overhead costs and an over-competitive environment. For a while before they screwed it up, everyone knew who Sonic Team, AM2 and Amusement Vision were, and to a lesser extent Smilebit and Overworks. They had identities, they had certain design eccentricities that could be identified to them and the talent was acknowledged as a result.
Can't blame me for thinking Nintendo could benefit from these things, and the organizational aspect of how they work wouldn't have to change as a result, either. So I am not seeing a downside.
What about the part of SPD that doesn't just develop games and works with other studios to help produce games?
What's stopping them from having a name? With the exception of SPD 3, all of them make their own content on occasion. And when they work with other developers, let those other developers take the billing for the game. Simple.