OK, I see where you’re coming from.

It’s a given that if you rely on archive.php as your catch-all template, you’re bound to write a lot of conditional logic.

How’s about some more specific templates, so WP will have made at least one decision for you?

Personally, I try to limit my use of hooks to situations where they’re the only way to do the job in hand. There is an overhead, after all.

And by using a globally-accessible function rather than a constant, I’ve abstracted somewhat, and I have future options that don’t involve trawling all the code to modify references to constants.

Just a suggestion ;)

I’m pretty happy with constants at the moment, but I’ll bear the getter / static technique in mind for when it works better.

Have you considered a static variable in a getter function in functions.php?

First time you call the getter from within the title tag, the getter gets the title, storing it one time as a static.

Next call to the getter (from wherever) returns the same. Avoids gunking up the global space.