DISCLAIMER: The following observations are my own from having been in this fandom since the games originally came out. No actual research was done, because I am lazy. Please correct me in areas where I'm wrong, because I really do think it's an interesting topic! Also I am not making any statements or judgements about any of these ships whatsoever, I'm just interested in what fandom calls them.
But ok. I have a lot of thoughts on Ace Attorney ship names (as they appear in Western vs Japanese fandom).
Ship names from the OG trilogy era of games tend to be the same as what Japanese fandom uses (ex. narumitsu, narumayo). This makes sense, because the original GBA trilogy had been established in Japan for years before they were ported to the DS and localized to English. A fledgling fandom was born and found a wealth of stuff already right there, albeit in a different language.
(This is not universally or strictly true, of course; ships that don't have huge Japanese fandoms, like fradrian, or which only became popular many years later, like franmaya, go English. Although "miego" might straight up be an outlier? It's not a perfect theory).
Ship names with characters who debut in the second trilogy or first Investigations game, on the other hand, almost universally use namesmushes of the characters' localized names (ex. langworth, justicykes). This also makes sense, because the games were released in Japan and the West in close succession, and the English-language fan machine had already been running at full steam at that point.
And then AAI2, which was fan translated over a decade before being officially translated, is the wild West of ship names, but most notably and uniquely, it has namesmushes based in Japanese, but created by the English-language fandom. The Japanese names of characters have been utilized not because of overlap with pre-existing fandom, but in order to avoid using fan translation names. So we've ended up with Japanese ship names that AREN'T the same ship names that the actual Japanese fans use. Fore example, the pairing name of Simeon Saint and Bronco Knight is nearly universally referred to as "manosouta" in English fandom, but the Japanese fandom calls it umasaru, which basically just means horse-monkey.
On top of that, you have a contingent of people trying to update the original pseudo-Japanese AAI2 ships into something localization-based (saintknight). And then you also have people who are still deeply attached to the fan translation names (I don't actually know any Eustace Winner ship names but I do know that the Sebastian Debeste fans seemed to have a collective coronary when they saw the official name. Y'all all right?).
Finally, non-namesmush names don't survive either Japanese or Western fandom, no matter how clever they are. As far as I can tell, there's exactly one person on pixiv who was trying to make 馬草 happen (horse + grass, grass being the first kanji in the name Souta, a pun that means "horse fodder"). That's a really good pun, dang it! And to this day, I still look onto the Blackmadhi fandom wistfully and whisper to myself, "Sad Panda."
That very last part might just be me though.
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