OC tag problems

On Furbooru, essentially all character category tags are styled in the form of character (franchise). But oc category tags don’t follow this same system. In fact, 273 out of the 372 existing OC tags have no extra information other than the character name. This will undoubtedly lead to conflicts down the line.
 
After asking a staff member about this, and bringing up the possibility of conflicts, I was informed that the person who next encountered a name conflict could simply append a new (parenthesized designation) to the OC tag name. But this leads to problems, beyond the relative unfairness of the first-come first-serve nature of these tags…
 
For example, there are plenty of existing cases on Derpibooru where there are multiple OCs with the same name that inadvertently shared the same tag name, which leads to a problem because these entirely different OCs may then become indistinguishable for search or for filtering purposes. In addition, there was at least one case where a conflict resulted in an actual altercation between users.
 
Another problem that was raised was the problem of there being community ocs, or characters which have essentially lost their original ownership due to popularity, but are not canon to a particular source material - sort of like a generic trademark.
 
Upon asking about these cases, I was informed (rather unexpectedly) that these cases would be recast as the blue character category tags, even when these characters are not canon to a particular source material. This was because I had an implicit expectation that the blue tags were generally reserved for officially licensed/trademarked characters, and that the OC tags were primarily fan creations.
 
So if this is intended to actually be the case, and not just something that was poorly communicated to me in private, is there any meaningful distinction between the character category and the oc category? If there isn’t, could you please explain your rationale?

I’d prefer to axe oc and just use character. There’s less of a reason to make a distinction between media-originated characters and someone’s fursona here than at derpi, and the lines are a bit murkier here.
 
Also when it comes to first come first serve on names, I lean towards popularity. If one character has 50x the posts of another I’d rather just omit the (owner) part because most people are probably looking for that. If they’re similar enough just (owner) both of them. That’s what I’ve always done in the past and it’s worked pretty well to avoid conflicts.

@Anonymous #B060  
@Raptorshy
 
Because only staff can edit tag descriptions I was personally always placing the owner of the oc in brackets when tagging unless:  

@Raptorshy  

 
Can you explain why this is? I think there is a reasonable, meaningful distinction to be made between someone’s fursona, and say, judy hopps.

@Anonymous #B060  
There’s definitely a distinction, I just don’t think it matters as much.  
@CruFox  
You make a fair point about needing staff to change the type. Needing a thread to update tag type to character is not something I want to waste everyone’s time on. So I’m good keeping both.