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Nobunaga had no soldiers with him at the time so he killed himself supposedly Ranmaru burned the temple down to prevent Mitsuhides forces taking Nobunaga's head and Nobunaga's body was never recovered.
Considering they didn't have things like TV or newspapers and it was before the reforms banning peasants from having weapons and creating a dedicated soldiering class it is quite likely the average soldier would have no idea what Oda Nobunaga looked like or where he was all they would know is that they took orders from this guy and this guy was telling them that the enemy was in that temple.
As such, women in Japan were usually only there to tie the knot and bring in someone else of honor.
Another famous example from later being Toyotomi Hideyori's mother. Her influence and counsel to both Hideyoshi and Hideyori was considerable, arguably leading to Hideyori's loss to Ieyasu.
We have to remember as well that names like "Oda" were not family names per se, but house/clan names. The name was not strictly passed down in a bloodline, male or female.
People acquired different names according to developments, depending on if they served a temple, were adopted, took a certain government post, etc. Most of the famous samurai had various names throughout their lives, and even different names simultaneously. Even many of the "big names" we hear a lot about, like Ashikaga, were simply place names that the head of a house who had lordship of that place originally took.
It's similar to one of the English monarch's retainers being called "Salisbury" or "Essex," although of course, the clan system of Japan was different than the Germanic system in a place like England in many ways.
It's not a family name that is patrilineal or matrilineal in the strict sense, more like an identifier. As such, if you are Lord Essex, your daughter is not "Miss Essex", because it has more to do with your status within the gentry than it does actual blood relation. It's more about functionality and legitimacy of claims to certain offices or lands than it was honor.
Most of the great samurai families were Minamoto or Taira descent. Insofar as both originally were spawned from males in the imperial line, and were traced through the sons, you cannot say that there was "sexism" from that alone. There isn't a society that traces ancestry through both male and female at the same time: one system is always preferred and adopted over another.
This didn't stop women, like Masako, from carrying the name. Nor did a man's maternal heritage not count for anything: primogeniture did not exist in Japan at the time exactly like we encounter in the West, and amongst several competing male claimants to be the heir, a son's maternal ancestry could tip the balance and make him the chosen successor vs. a competing claimaint who was in all other aspects more or less equally eligible.
Again, I think feminists ideas of "power" and "sexism" have trouble confronting just the basic reality of life, which is that different functions find different forms. With the men being inclined to be warriors, in any society for that matter, it simply makes sense then that in a time of warfare male lineage is mentioned more prominently. But that does not mean that women did not have any social power, nor that there was some "sexism" at play whereby men were trying to actively surpress women's status. It's more simply the case of form following function.
In the Sengoku, bushido, honor and gender roles were not as strictly defined as the later myths have us believe. During Genkokujo, social mobility increased dramatically compared to the earlier, highly institutionalized forms during the heyday of the Heian period. That's why the era is called that to begin with, roughly meaning, "the low (born) overcome/overthrow the higher (born)".
Poor farmers became powerful lords, merchants acquired political and military power, banking started developing, free commerce, etc.
This trend also included women: women could and did run businesses, managed estates/farms and even administered entire villages/communities through things like the ikki system (which, despite what Shogun 2 implies, was not just something for Jodo Shin-shu, but there were many "ikkies" all over Japan).
After Hideyoshi conquered everyone, the free market commerce and associated social mobility that had been building for several centuries was systematically attacked by his regime, and this attack went into overdrive with Ieyasu's regime.
It's from the later Tokugawa system, which was incredibly rigid, centrally planned, and regulated, that we largely get these ideas about Japanese honor, the perfect tea ceremony, women never speaking a word in their own house, etc. and then extrapolate to say, "this must have been what it was like during Sengoku Jidai."
Then it gets worse, because we witness the even more centrally managed and socially engineered militarist regime from the 1880s-1945.
That is essentially what soldiering is though, i.e. having someone tell you to go kill someone, and then you do it. If you don't kill who you are told to kill, when you are told to do it, you aren't a good soldier. Thinking for yourself and choosing your own battles, if you are a soldier, is called "insubordination".
If anything, having a more professional soldiery makes it easier, not more difficult, to execute orders without regard to personal qualms or beliefs, because the system of delegation and execution is increasingly insitutionalized and distanced as the fighters become more professional. The less men are fighting for personal stake, beliefs, family, clan identity, etc. and the more they are fighting for simply the man next to him, who is part of the same "unit," i.e. the more there is a corporate identity, formed on the exploits of that unit and the fact they all derive their sustenance from serving that unit, the more "soldiers" you get, and the less "warriors." Let's not forget that the root of the word "soldier" means a man who is paid: simple as that.
TV and newspapers don't seem to make much of a difference either, or else we wouldn't have what we have today, like people clamoring to go back into Iraq to fight an ISIS that was armed and trained by the same people now saying we have to do something about them.
So I don't think it had so much to do with a less dedicated soldiering class, or lack of public information, if indeed either of those things was actually the case. The warrior class was more professionalized and organized at the time of Nobunaga's death than it had ever been before in Japan.
One could argue that a truly professional force would not betray Nobunaga because they were all beholden to him as 'commander in chief' or something. But the very fact that they obviously did not feel themselves beholden to him shows that what they were really concerned about was their sustenance, if indeed they were aware that they were killing Nobunaga. They must have felt they had more to gain by following their ambitious leader Mitsuhide than not, regardless of any personal convictions about Nobunaga. Looking out for one's best economic interest and making economic calculation in actually practicing war as a craft indicates the treatment of war more as a profession, and not less.
On the other hand, if we go with the idea they were ignorant of the fact that they were even killing Nobunaga to begin with, we come back to the first idea that basically they were just 'following orders,' obviously not willing (or able) to question who they were killing, why they were killing him, and to what end.
The various Roman civil wars demonstrate the same thing. The more professional the Roman military became, the more easily it was used as a tool of the state, or by people seeking to secure the state, and thus, it became increasingly easy for Romans to kill other Romans. The prime motivator was payment: whoever was seen as being able to ensure increased payment and benefits for the legion became the champion that the soldiers wished to see become emperor.
The more I think about it, I can see another way to interpret what you are saying, which is that prior to banning peasants from joining the daimyos' hosts, you had a less dedicated soldiery, or more peasants in the host, and this made a difference in determining if the men were easily persuaded to kill Nobunaga, or even knew who he was. The inference is that peasants would not be as informed.
But that begs the question of why you would conflate 'dedicated soldiery' with being more informed and/or more able to act on that information according to their own conviction.
After Hideyoshi's reforms, most of the soldiery had been peasants, or jizamurai, prior to the class enforcement anyway. At what point do the scales tip and professional soldiers become, on average, more informed than a peasant, laborer, etc.?
And if they are, we still come back to the idea about acting on that information. Considering that being a good soldier entails the aforesaid ability to act unquestioningly on what is ordered, there is actually every incentive (from an economic perspective) for a solider to be the least informed about affairs not pertaining to his immediate duties/responsibilities as possible. In other words, most people in any profession, soldiering or otherwise, do not typically want cognition to run counter to task mastering.
I think one of the most plausible theories out there is that Hideyoshi actually conspired with Mitsuhide to take Nobunaga and his line out, but Hideyoshi double crossed Mitsuhide so as to legitimize his own drive for power in the aftermath.
It seems unlikely that Akechi just decided out of the blue to do what he did, much less that Hideyoshi was instantly able to make peace with the Mori and get all the way back to Osaka and find him in just several days. It looks more like an elaborate plan that was probably months in the making, with the end-game portion known only to Hideyoshi himself and Mitsuhide as an unwitting pawn.