I agree that there is a waste of vertical real estate, and there are a couple of things we can do about that without removing the article block completely. Even if it were used for a one-line description "this is the XenReviews manual" it doesn't need to include article contributors, and the extra padding is only there to make short articles more readable rather than having the contributors right against it.
If the contributor section is hidden, then the padding can be removed, and it would only be the title and possibly the description line. If no description is entered, I suppose we can also have an option to hide the default text if it's a container-type page (index, area, book, category, etc).
Hiding the contributors is one of the "page settings" we've been planning to add for a while. It makes using VaultWiki for product listings and such (like we do here) much easier without having to write plugins to improve their look.