My goal is to imitate the SMF feature that some people like me that have switched to vBulletin may be missing

You'll undersand the goal of it better if you see a SMF forum
For instance in our forum we don't allow custom titles. Also this is useful so that the user can have a comment for his avatar or a sentence to comlete it's meaning. It's totally different from the usertitle. This has to do mostly with the avatar, not the user overall. This is also why the text is not displayed if the user doesn't have an avatar: there is no need to.
Also your code would get quite messy if a forum has many usergroups I think.
Thanks however for the alternative, maybe some people would need it