It makes perfect sense that it wasn't even conceived of before GR. No one would care that Lobbyist and Crooked Politician are the same badge, after all. The only way anyone would even notice is by comparing the settitle number.
Now it's a different story, since switching sides turns one badge into the other. It's still only about 15% of all badges that actually change names, however, so it may not be worth the effort.
Good point on the icons. I was wondering about that, so I did a quick spot check. It turns out that only 33 badges with different names per alignment also have different icons on each side. On the other hand, there are 109 with the
same name but different icons.
For quick reference, I threw together a
spreadsheet listing the badges that have different icons depending on which alignment you are.
Accolades present an interesting challenge. I'll have to look at how the pages are set up, but I would think we would simply outline the steps for a hero/vigilante to get the heroside ones and for a villain/rogue to get the villainside ones. At most we'd provide a link to the corresponding accolade that grants the same power for the other alignment, and leave it up to the reader to deduce that they can get it easier by side-switching if they want.