Geno might be possible as playable. I didn't consider Trophies to be an immediate chance kill, and Spirits, their upgrade, doesn't change that for me. Possibly not the first Fighter's Pass, since that seems like it was decided when the first set of Spirits was, but later on, it wouldn't even matter. They're not really the equivalent of Assist Trophies either. Nowhere on their levels. But I never really believed Spirits automatically stop a possible character from being playable. The knowledge of when they were chosen does coincide with when the Spirits were possibly finished, but we can't even say that for sure. So while I don't expect them to be playable, it's a faulty reasoning since you can't actually prove with any strong evidence the DLC was mainly decided via the Spirits timing-wise. That's just a maybe.
Regardless, I keep my expectations tempered. Anything beyond the Fighter's Pass is a completely different timing and Spirits are rather irrelevant to that so there's little reason to take them into account. AT's are far more key to gameplay than a PNG with a bonus effect. Besides that, they wouldn't even need to rename a Spirit since there's no real reason to. The actual Fighter Spirit would already have a different file name, and they don't really need to give either a unique name either. It's not a necessity. If they want to, cool. If not, not an issue anyway. You can't equip non-Fighter Spirits so it wouldn't make a difference categorizing them.