To clarify, you don't necessarily need a transforming search in your searchTemplate. However, note that if the searchTemplate is non-transforming, then you may or may not reach the 10,000 event search limit.
The real issue here is in the field extractions not being passed down to the post process search. All searches in dashboards are run in fast mode, which means that selected fields are not automatically available to downstream searches.
As a workaround, you can add "| fields *" to your searchTemplate to explicitly extract fields for post process searches.
So, it would look like this:
<searchTemplate>index=XXXX sourcetype=YYYYY | search NAME="$NAME$" TITLE="*" | fields *</searchTemplate>
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