Hi,
I enjoy DT in repect to its neglection of naming conventions:
(1) identical names can be used in the same group
(2) characters which are not allowed in the finder or on other file systems are allowed
(3) names can be long.
Sometimes I export a group or the whole database as “files and folder”, so the whole hierarchy is created on Finder basis with the DevonTech XML files for meta information.
Problems occur with names that are too long and with chharacters that are not allowed, particularly if I have to export for use on a (brrrrr) Windows machine 
or for exchange via USB stick.I did not encounter problems with identical names in the same folder, but may be I just did not yet realize that.
My suggestions:
DevonThing should
(1) name identical names with incremental numbers during export, dropping the number during re-import into DT (if there is any solution necessary in this case, see above)
(2) set escape characters for forbidden characters in another preference pane. So these characters can beexchanged during ex- and re-import.
(3) cut off automatically long names to the appropriate size, these should be added again during re-import.
All these changes could be stored in the DTech.storage file like other metadata.
So far,
Maria