The reason for including the style in the font name field is to ensure consistency of name, and correct appearance of the font, between different applications. Otherwise, there are too many different interpretations of the many font name fields.

This problem is fundamental to digital fonts, enshrined in Microsoft's original sin of defining a typeface family as four styles only.

s/digital fonts/Microsoft's TrueType/

Thanks for your quick replys.

Amazing that Microsoft has messed up even this.
When will the digital world be healed?

How do you deal with the your long font list (that could be shorter if everything worked)?
Just live with it or do you have most fonts deactivated?

Contemporary fonts contain several different name sets that are compatible with different versions of various software. The Windows 4-style family is only one of those name sets, it just happens to have been around longer than most of the other name sets, but really there's no reason to think of it as the basic naming any more than any one of the other name sets, and I can imagine future font tools relegating this to a legacy, backwards-compatibility set. FontLab already goes part way to doing this by enabling one to view the Fonts panel contents by either 4-style or OT name set. Once the 4-style family ceases to be the default naming set in the Font Info panel too, it will be easier to think about names in fresh ways. Note that even Microsoft have moved on from the 4-style family in DWrite, although the 4-style family is obviously going to remain an important support issue for some time to come.

Amazing that Microsoft has messed up even this.

Says who? Microsoft began--and remains primarily--an business-oriented operating system. As such, pigeonholing font choices to those most likely to be used in business applications--regular, italic, bold and bold italic--makes perfect sense, and needs not apologize. With the advent of Windows 2000/NT4--with native support for PostScript fonts--Windows encroached on the Macintosh's traditional territory (graphic design) so effectively that Apple rather quickly abandoned its dead-end "classic" OS. And, just recently, Apple abandoned its "superior" Motorola architecture, switching to Intel processors. An old Mac Addict bumper sticker slogan proclaimed, "Intel inside, idiot outside." Oops. Hell, even Adobe finally gave up on its disinformation campaign against TrueType (developed jointly by Apple and Microsoft, a fact which amazed many hardcore Mac fans) and surrendered to the inevitable. CFF fonts have PostScript Type 1 outlines, but they're package inside a TrueType wrapper.

The point is, things change. Anyone want to buy a Jetson-style OS 9.3 iMac?

I guess this is even more complex than I first thought.

And this was not intended to turn into a Apple vs MS debate.

It's more interseting if you have come up with methods to handle this problem.
How do you practically solve this in your workflow?