From the translator POV, the great advantages of standardizing these
lists via iso-codes are:
1. the original strings are comprehensive, accurate and correctly
spelt (!)
2. we only have to translate them once, and maintain that single
translation
I don't think it is very easy to change the names in tzdata (except if
they are wrong). They are standardized among various UNIX systems, so
the only way it can work is by importing the names from tzdata into
iso-codes. Also a patch to change the names will be difficult to
maintain wrt new upstream versions.
From my point of view, this has to be done in the reverse way, that is
importing cities from tzdata into iso-codes, and then using the
translation from iso-codes in tzdata.