It's worth distinguishing between (1) "The moderators retitled such-and-such an article, and it wasn't an improvement" and (2) "The moderators retitle articles,

It's worth distinguishing between (1) "The moderators retitled such-and-such an article, and it wasn't an improvement" and (2) "The moderators retitle articles, and that's bad". #1 might be true in this case (I see greendestiny doesn't think so; I'm on the fence) but it's very weak evidence for #2. For what it's worth (and I know this is also weak evidence) when I've looked at an article and thought "Wow, HN should have used a different title for this" it's much much much more often been because of editorializing by the submitter than because the original article title was used but wasn't very good. We need moderators aggressively retitling articles submitted with stupid or biased titles. (Not only because that fixes those titles, but also because it reduces the incentive for submitters to submit with bad titles.) And if we have that, then inevitably there will be occasional misjudged retitlings. The question is whether the benefit outweighs the cost, and in my mind there's very little doubt that it does.