Limited resources in the titlepage option/environment in the standard
styles, inflexibility of \maketitle... non-standard things in
the title (such as logo images, etc.)
The titling package provides a number of facilities that
permit manipulation of the appearance of a \maketitle command, the
\thanks commands within it, and so on. The package also defines a
titlingpage environment, that offers something in between the
standard classes' titlepage option and the titlepage
environment, and is itself somewhat configurable.