Give me one last try. I promise that I will give up then 
Bear is a notes app and after implementation of backlinks in combination with its fancy concept of nested tags it also will be a full pkm app.
I use bear in that regard but I use it also as a serious app for long form writing. I am coming from ulysses, left it for several reasons and have found bear. Bear offers me almost everything I like in ulysses and furthermore gives me many things I missed in ulysses.
I like writing longer text. And I like writing them upon thoughts I have written in notes which are connected through tags and crosslinks. I use the pkm features of bear to produce as result long text.
Such text has a huge outline where H1 likely appears several times and addresses different subtopics. These topics are summarised by: the title. Every book, thesis or essay is structured like that.
I have rethought your arguments against automatically formatting the first line as title, and maybe you are right. Actually the most elegant solution would be my request for pandoc metadata block: I start with an empty note and in the first line where an empty note starts, and only there I can use the “%” sign to cause the desired formatting. Bear would anyway treat that line as title. That is totally compliant with MacFarlanes specification for pandoc and probably could become part of commonmarks specification. The effort for the devs would also be relatively minimal here: actually everything remains as it is but the first line is formatted as real title in editor if it starts with “% “
I hope you understand that my request for that is not an abstruse one