I'll agree that you can look at the creators and interpret wish fulfillment in Terry Long. If your interpretation is accurate, then yeah, ick. However...
A love interest outside the superhero world is one of the things I liked about TNTT, and either Wonder Girl or Kid Flash seems to me to have been the logical one to have it. They needed Kid Flash besotted with Raven for most of his membership, and although they gave Cyborg a relationship too, it needed to be as complicated as his character.
Terry Long not only provided a less complicated relationship, it provided a way to connect the team (and Wonder Girl specifically) with a wider world, filled with ordinary people. As a character, I also liked the way that he wasn't threatened by Wonder Girl's power, or the fact that she had friends in a world to which he could never belong (it somewhat impresses me that they didn't periodically have him getting kidnapped or what have you in the first several years). It demonstrated that The Titans lived in a world full of all kinds of people other than superheroes, their enemies, and terrified extras.
PS: The accusations of "intellectual pretensions" is probably unfair toward Terry; maybe the creators did have them (I, personally, have no idea), but the character was written as a professor.