Wow. I'll go back to the beginning.
Russian doctrine of active use was to go active at detection of US sub because the assumption was that the US sub already had them. Getting a quick range is not a bad thing at that point. Randomly going active in the middle of the ocean? Probably not. There was a case of a Russian sub tracking one of our ssbn's for an extended time using active, and there were countermeasure methods put in place to prevent it in the future.
US doctrine was the first sub to go active was the first sub to die. It's a laser beam to your location.
US sub battle was assumed to be either very close combat where you find an enemy ship close aboard or a long range approach where they find you only when you shoot. I highly doubt that Russian doctrine was anything close to it. Go active, match bearing rate if you have one, shoot.
On the titanium thing, a significant part of this is that titanium has a finite fatigue life. With steel, you can design so that you can stress it infinitely and it never fails. Titanium does not have this point, so each stress of the hull lessens its life. US subsafe procedures are to go to test depth basically every time out. Those titanium subs wouldn't last doing that. Same principle applies to soviet titanium fighters. There are many on the market at the airframe hour limit for the fatigue reason.
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