HN has some heuristics to reduce hyperbole in submissions which occasionally backfire amusingly.
[...] please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.
As it stands, the HN title suggests that Raymond thinks the C++ 'try' keyword is a poor imitation of some other language's 'try'. In reality, the post is about a way to mimic Java's 'finally' in C++, which the original title clearly (if humorously) encapsulates. Raymond's words have been misrepresented here for over 4 hours at this point. I do not understand how this is an acceptable trade-off.
Relying on somebody to detect the error, email the mods (significant friction), and then hope the mods act (after discussion has already been skewed) is not really a great solution.
Anyway, going forward, if anything like this happens again folks should simply shoot an email immediately to the mods and if the topic is really interesting deserving of more discussion they can always request the mods to keep the post on the frontpage for a longer time period via second-chance pool etc.
It just takes a minute or two of one's time and hence not worth getting het up over.
Again, this post was misrepresenting Raymond's words for over 7 hours. That's most of its time on the front page. The current system doesn't work.
This is the first time i have seen the auto-editorializing algorithm make a mess of the semantic meaning of a sentence which is certainly unfortunate. In most other cases (which are quite rare btw) it is generally much more benign. I presume the mods will be taking another look at their algorithm.
However, given the ways people try to influence the content on HN via title, language, brigading etc. it is good that the algorithm be strict rather than loose to prevent casual gaming of the system. And it works quite well contrary to your claim.