Hi! I'll oblige to the extent I think is okay to. (We can't reasonably share too much detail about things but we like to be pro-transparency where possible.)

Name clearings have historically been rough on the site because of the huge traffic spike. It's definitely not good for the site if a single page gets a billion HTTP requests at the same time. However, we've finally gotten our infrastructure to a point where it can withstand it, as some of you have noticed with recent clearings. It's related to everything we've been doing to solve lag in general. Tl;dr- Right now, name clearings aren't the major strain they used to be.

Nope. We already use ID numbers on the back end. This isn't the reason pet names disallow special characters. Naming is restricted because of all the places the pet name itself is used on the website, and since pets are definitely one of the oldest features on this pet site, there are a lot of places in the code that don't handle apostrophes and stuff as well as others. There's also the issue that names have to work in the URL for a pet's profile, which is also behind some of the restrictions.

[edit] Edit to add - If you want to reply to me, please do ping me in a new post lol instead of editing an existing one, much love to you OP, but I will just be so confused otherwise