Town Rank?

What is the purpose of the Town ranking system?
How does it work?
How are the names decided? I notice each town has different names and different ranks?

As far as I know the highest town rank is always the rank 1 Councilor, the second town rank is always for the members of the Council and all other ranks, their names, and which citizen receives which rank are freely determined by each town. We have to manually set these town ranks for each individual citizen.

Manually setting them sounds like a lot of work. I can see pros and cons to a manual system instead of an automated system.  Special thanks to whoever works hard on setting ranks and updating. Wow!

I think it's useful to have a title when you are a council member or something like that. But what purpose does all the other ranks serve? And how does a town freely determine which rank each citizens are at any given time? Is there a criteria for non council member ranks? Or is it just a bit of random fun?  It's fine either way, I'm just curious ;p

That's a great way to honor people actually. It makes sense with the setting/time period of the game. Thank you for explaining it.