That's assuming an awful lot of unncessary bad faith. While the title guidelines are enforced here in an incredibly nonintuitive, nonobjective, nonconsistent way, that's no reason to imply malfeasance.
Thanks for the defense, but I feel a need to pipe up for HN moderators also. It's not true that the title guideline is enforced as you say. If it were, the threads would be full of complaints about titles, when in fact such complaints are an order of magnitude less common than they were, say, 5 years ago. This subthread is an exception, and you'll notice that we've attempted to accommodate the complaints by editing the title again.
We have spent years calibrating how we handle titles and it's one of the most consistent things we do. I know it can be nonintuitive to casual readers at times, but that's because applying that guideline is surprisingly complicated in practice. If it were your job, you'd soon find that as well. Also, people only notice the cases that stand out, which tend to be the edits they dislike and feel we got wrong (which maybe we did). That's a sample bias. Probably less than 5% of title edits even get noticed. Maybe even less than 1%.
It's nonobjective in that the title guidelines carry subjective judgements.
Its' nonconsistent because of the previous problem.
It's unintuitive for the reasons you described above.
I think the reason it sticks in my craw so much is what I'll call the "rake to the face" phenomenon. Much like stepping on a rake in a dark shed and getting whacked in the face, it's usually surprising, usually unexpected, and usually painful (though mentally rather than physically.. "where did that article I read earlier go? No way it got flagged off.. Oh, there it is, they messed with the freaking title again. That was a waste of 5 minutes.")
This is worse when a descriptive title that actually calls out why someone should be interested in the article is reverted to something generic, which IMO, actively makes the site worse in furtherance of The Rules, which is never a good thing.
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That aside.. If I could float a feature request that doesn't require any rule changes? Put a [*] or some other signifier next to titles that have been modified, and have it grey out over time (kinda like how comments get lighter and lighter as their score falls) and eventually disappear. Per your own search example, title changes are rare enough that there likely wouldn't be many on the front page, and it would give people like me who lose track of renamed articles a place or two to look.
