Larry Hynes on 2015-04-17T21:07:04Z says:

I've been in touch with Scott about this via email and he felt that we might have a broader discussion here regarding vit's handling of quotes in task titles.

It seems that vit used to quote the entire title string, but that was removed to address [#114 | https://bug.tasktools.org/browse/VT-114] and [#111 | https://bug.tasktools.org/browse/VT-111].

I'm not sure what the best way to handle this is. As it stands I would be happy with a better error message, or better handling of the error message, but long-term I do think it would be great if vit could handle these cases without throwing an error.