I don't think it's fair to blame Tim Berners Lee for this. The WWW was supposed to serve documents. The TITLE would have been rendered by your browser, and in fact, it still kind of is, in the window title bar.
The Web has long departed from that vision however; very few pages, if any, could still be considered documents.
I think it is fair to say TBL didn't come up with a perfect design, and he never set out to. He solved a simpler problem than the ones we have now, and that's just fine. He might be the last person to imagine HTML would have continued on with so much of its original design intact.
The Web has long departed from that vision however; very few pages, if any, could still be considered documents.