I don't recall the Titans' conduct ever being quite that acrimonious, though I was only a Titan for a year or so (maybe less, I forget). It seemed like a pretty good system back then but I wasn't around for whatever caused the Magistrates to be born.
I will say that one thing I appreciated about the Titans that seems less the case with the Magistrates is that the Titans' characters had a lower profile. The magistrates sometimes seem like an OOC version of some of the big IC personas in the game. Several of the Titans definitely had characters with high profiles, but maybe it was just that we always emailed each other and so it wasn't our IG names or forum names that were pasted to everything...it just had a feel of 'hey guys, what should we do about this' and not 'wasn't that the same guy who was just celebrating his realm kicking ass.'
Maybe the distinction was mostly cosmetic or maybe this stuff matters to me more than it should. I've also never been a magistrate. I just know that it was easier to compartmentalize a lot of game issues when emailing another human being and addressing them by their name.
