Is there any way for Lackey to acknowledge cards with the same Name in the Name field, yet different just about everything else, as different cards?
It's obvious that appending a number would be the easiest workaround, but I want to avoid this if at all possible.
Unfortunately, Lackey uses only the card name as a unique identifier, since it is one of the three mandatory columns in the card data file. Pokemon TCG had the same problem as you, since pokemon would change every set but keep the same name.
There is no other workaround since cards don't have GUIDs. You could petition Trevor to implement GUIDs, but that mean a lot of work to just to make one or two plugins look prettier.
What is a name other than a way of identifying something? This is kind of a debate about semantics, but I want a person to be able to communicate the identity of a card by using its name. To identify a card, therefore card names must be unique to the card. If I switched to an ID method, then people couldn't import cards by their name alone, and that's worse than making each card name unique. Copying a deck list to a clipboard and hitting the paste button in the deck editor is a convenient way to load a deck.
There's many different ways to assert that all card names are unique.