if you have a feature that has developed a content type with 5 fields and the users want to change the name, is it okay to change it in the site settings or are you ill advised to change this as the names may confuse the meaning?

eg: I have a field called

TRRequestDate (I think this is what its original name was when created)

its currently displayed as "Request Date" however I think it had something else before this ("Transfer Reason Request Date" possibly)

Now the users want to change it to "Next Action Date"...

I don't have a problem with this but as I'm pretty new to this stuff I feel like this might be starting to stray in meaning from the original variable name, and I wonder if some day someone is going to be looking at the UI at "Next Action Date" and scratch their head for hours trying to figureout where that field is from the Code or VS Solution...

Is this a non-issue or is this something that we should create a new field for and migrate the data from the old field to a new one? (eg: NextActionDate)

... OR... is there some way to rename a "underlying" variable name in SharePoint that I dont' know abo

Note in advance: no experience with sharepoint so take this as for what it is.

Are you talking about the database side of things or about the presentation side.

Changing the database side of things might be tricky unless you completely understand the database; a simple join (not with relationship) will no longer work if you run queries unless you update the query to reflect the new column name.

For the presentation side, it does not matter what is displayed in the header of a column as long as the user understands what it means. However, today they want it to be called 'A' and tomorrow they want it to be called 'B' and you can keep on updating (job security ;))