If a person is asking you about a particular coral, it generally implies that they like the look of it. Besides, we do the exact same things with acros, montis, chalices, favias, even mushrooms now. We see it in captive bred clowns and all the patterns available for them. Flower hybridizers do the same thing, but with better organization
An extremely naive viewpoint when it comes to this hobby. Not only are we terrible as a group at getting the scientific name correct to start with (assuming that the species we're looking at has even been described) but it also does absolutely nothing to alleviate the issue of trying to find specific color/pattern variations within a particular species, especially with zoanthids where, scientifically speaking, color and oral disc patterns are meaningless.