I'm certainly not defending the practice. I don't like repeated pull quotes either, and prefer to use highlight quotes that supplement the text without repeating myself (and I use a CSS class called pullquote to do so.)

I suspect that in an era where TL;DR is the norm (has anyone thought about naming this "Generation TLDR"?) they're mostly used to get 1% of the audience to read something more than the headline and see the featured photo before retweeting or posting to Facebook. Unfortunately, we're apparently part of the 0.001% that bothers to read through an entire post anymore, so we're the only ones to notice the UX problem.

Maybe being able to embed a pull quote in a title would help fix the issue?!

I think that for many, the advent of responsive design has done great things, but things like this fall through the cracks in the process. It would be nice if mobile displays would automatically redact CSS classes that are used in this manner as part of their workflow. I find the logic about as smart as including bulky javascript widgets for sharing articles to Facebook, Twitter, et al on mobile when almost all users will use the built-in mobile sharing ability instead.

Maybe the new AMP spec can help publishers to automatically remove these repetitive type of pull quotes for the next generation?