This is not an answer to your original issue, but a sort of work around.
Why not try using project standards? You could make the title bock into a multiview block in a standards file, and then automatically fix any mvblocks that have been user modified. When you want to make changes, you would change the standards file. (You could even version it for posterity.)
It wouldn't be as fast as an xref, but would do until something better comes along.
I haven't tried this myself though, lol. I use standards a lot, but not for that.