In the service directory, at the high level view of the service, you get a list of layers by name. these are the names that get sucked into the legend. In order to make legend readable, these layer names must be short. In my case, I have several layers with the same name now after I shortened them for the legend. In the service directory, you now have to click the layer name to open the layer page to see the description. So, its not entirely clear to the developer which service to use without having to drill down to the description. Not a huge problem but definately a "nice to have".
I was hoping for a way to tell the flex component to not display the layer name or to somehow hide it on the results returned by the rest end point.