@Jim - I've read this twice and I still don't understand what it is you are doing
However to answer your last question in the post, yes it does sound like an ugly hack.
You should never have a need to be fiddling with the title field in calibre, encouraging people to do so will then break numerous other plugins like metadata download, find duplicates etc.
Since I don't get what you are hoping to achieve I don't know if this is the correct solution for you, but have you looked into metadata plugboards
? You don't mention them in your post. They are the "proper" way to manipulate titles when sending to the device without changing them in calibre.