Including the prefix as part of the name instead of making it a separate column would be a very big departure indeed.
Implementing this in a statpanel in the way you describe, and even adding it to appearance info, would be straightforward. The real problems are:
1) The inconsistency vs. the behavior of suffix is huge. This would confuse users. They'd wonder if atom.prefix got inlined with the name, why does atom.suffix get its own column? And why inline when another column could be added?
2) The statpanel effectively has a prefix column already, and the info control has the prefix-color option to go with it. Having two entities both called a prefix (the column and the inline name) would be even more confusing.
3) This advances the var soup problem, without being a compelling feature that would potentially impact many games.
4) There's a trivial workaround.
Suffix and prefix work together. They are antonyms. If prefix makes no sense in relation to suffix then you've done something wrong.
Lets face the fact that suffix really isn't a suffix at all. It's an extra column.
To be consistent, your prefix text would have to be in a new column magically positioned between the icon and the name of your objects. This is a problem because any object with a long prefix would push the names column far to the right. It's also awkward to have non-mouse-interactive text between an interactive icon and name. This is what you would be asking for, if you wanted it to be anything like suffix.
To be inconsistent, your prefix text would be part of the name and would break the alignment of names. It would also be mouse interactive. This is what you are actually asking for, as far as I can tell, whether you know it or not, and there's really no similarity between suffix and this prefix setup.