Not just cosmetic, but also encouraging the use of it for non-ore things. It's not the best reason, but I think it's worthwhile.
I don't have a suggestion for what it could be renamed to though.
It would be nice to access things other than ores from other mods, being able to access things like "armorHelmetBronze", or "wireIron". Technically, ore dictionary allows that, but the name doesn't encourage it.
I don't want to generate my copper unless no other mod adds copper, to do this I need to check if oreCopper has been registered in the ore dictionary. How would I do this?
That's rather convenient,
int length = stack.getTagCompound().getInteger("Length");
However, yields a null pointer exception.
I assume I would need to set the integer first, but where would I do that?