Subreddits with ideal names got an early advantage which helps boost the subscriber count, especially because reddit's search has always been terrible. Like I said, discoverability is tricky and not every subreddit that tries to fork off from a popular one is successful, but if people think that /r/india is more "official" than /r/india2 or even /r/india4204eva it's because they don't understand how reddit works.

The closest thing reddit had to official public subreddits were the defaults. For just about everything else it was 'first come first serve' to get a good subreddit name and then you're still at the whims of the current moderation team. People have the option to take over subreddits and change the culture through mod replacement, convincing the admins to give it them, or by brigading.

I think reddit could do a better job letting people know that the subreddits with the most obvious name aren't necessarily the most active, the most fairly moderated, or the highest quality. Even better, I think they should go back to having defaults and letting the community choose who gets them with a means to vote to put them under new management so that people can put more faith in a documented subset of subreddit names.

You identified the issue in the first paragraph, which is that the public doesn't understand how reddit works so the default named subs have that advantage, which in the case of nationally-oriented subs makes some members nervous about the moderation team.

I participate in reddit and appreciate the endless forking of True____ communities to preserve discussion quality, but it's a different issue.