@ackleybj - Welcome to the Calibre forums.
Firstly, you are quite correct that if you do not have the automerge feature turned on, then Calibre treats anything with the same title as a possible duplicate, regardless of the author. I 100% agree that displaying the author with the title would make it easier to understand when you have a false positive being reported. I would suggest that you raise a feature request on the
Calibre bug tracker, and hopefully Kovid or someone will either make the change or respond otherwise.
The second thing I would add is that have you considered looking at turning on the Automerge functionality, in Preferences->Adding books. Many posts in this thread have discussed this in detail (particularly the changes made to the features you have with it now). What this will give you is a duplicate detection based on authors being
identical. You can choose from the dropdown what you want to do when it does detect such a duplicate. You might find this option significantly reduces the manual steps that you deal with currently.
Good luck!