Real vs. Artificial achievements

Remember the time you finally got that item you played A Link to the Past dungeon for? Did "Achievement unlocked: New powers" or something similar popped up? Of course not, that would be silly. But you felt like you achieved something nevertheless.

That felt so great...

Yet, lazy designers of today thinks they can make game rewarding with some lazy things like this:

So I've done great and got something with no real or in game value in return. That makes sense...

Sometimes they even reward you for something you'd done anyway:

You gotta be kidding me...

That's what I call lazy game design. Not only it does make achievements completely pointless, especially in last case, where they're basically handed off for just playing the game, but after playing few games with "achievements" done this way you are sick of any achievements whatsoever. And it doesn't have to be that way, really it doesn't.

Real achievements

Let get back to our first (and only so far) example of meaningful achievement, shall we?

Yep, I'm talking about LTTP. Didn't it feel great when you got bow, bombs or even full heart container? Or after defeating dungeon's boss? You felt... almost like you achieved something, didn't you? Yet, no "Achievement unlocked" in sight. That is what I call "real achievements", as opposed to artificial ones presented thorough most of previous section.

Trick is to make player feel like they've achieved something, not pointing it out in annoying, "Hey, listen!" sort of way. So how make people feel like they're achieving something? Put several branches thorough your level or map of varying difficulty. Of course there would be path that in all cases would guarantee successfully finishing level, but without any rewards. Then there would be harder paths that would reward player according to their difficulty in various ways.

By rewards I mean many different things. It can be story tidbits/some foreshadowing, like Rattman's dens in Portal and Portal 2, it can be some rare item, etc. It largely depends on kind of game you're making. Rewards that would be good in shooter may not be as good in a puzzle game.

There are some very narrow cases where achievements in "Achievement unlocked" may add to the experience, like in aforementioned Portal series, but overall I think they are more harmful that they are worth and even Portal could live without them (what is in achevements names could be either put into dens or GLaDOS/Wheatley dialogue).

That being said, what are YOUR opinions on the subject?