I was working on something a while back that had a bunch of different leaves in it, but they didn't all need to be unique.  I had a few different leaf meshes that created an absolutely huge file that ran pretty slowly when duplicated a bunch of times, but having all the objects link to one of the original 3 or 4 meshes worked much better.  So I had meshes named leaf1 through leaf4 or something like that, each of which had several hundred objects linked to it, and the objects were something like leaf1_1 through however many there were for each type.

I think some of the exporters do let you change how things are named, but I'm not sure.