That all seems reasonable to me. It's a tradeoff. One thing that frequently happens is that an edited title helps an article make the front page, and then we revert it after that. I think this can be a good balance sometimes. (If it were a bad article for HN, we wouldn't do that—rather we would downweight the thread.)
I don't want to say "it's ok to break the rule in such a case for such a purpose" because one can't say that with any precision—it will just be heard as "ignore the rule and do whatever you want".
I don't want to say "it's ok to break the rule in such a case for such a purpose" because one can't say that with any precision—it will just be heard as "ignore the rule and do whatever you want".