It's not so much about being "better" as having motives that are more aligned with those of the audience. The headline writer's goal is to get people to click on the link by whatever means necessary so they can serve ads. My goal -- and I believe the goal of most HN submitters -- is to be informative. (Actually, my real goal is to improve the quality of the content of the home page so that it's more useful to me when I read it.)

It's often pretty clear that the original articles headline is link bait to begin with, or may not convey the topic properly to a community such as HN.

Yes