Hi Tom,
To come back to your answer.
Yes the handlebars seem to me as the best/easiest way to achieve not rendering a title. The current Vanilla 2.0 theme has padding around the titles and you still see this padding even if there is no title. With your comment, I wanted to add the if statements in the handlebar files but to my surprise it is already there.
{{#if displayTitle}}
<div class="article-title">
<div role="heading" tabindex="0" class="article-title-inner h2" aria-level="2">
{{{displayTitle}}}
</div>
</div>
{{/if}}
How can I then remove the padding for the titles if there is no title?