Fun with HDR

Been playing around with HDR lately and luckily, I had some bracketed some shots during my Peru trip. Here's one of them. It's interesting to me what HDR and post-processing can do. A part of me is happy that it can "improve" the original images so well, but another part of me cringes and thinks how cheap this is. Should the goal of photography be to take these beautiful photos without post-processing (or at least very little)? If so, when show your photos to people, should you show them without any post-processing at all and potentially show them something that isn't as good? Or do you post-process and eventually, you start getting better and better and your photos won't need it anymore?

HDR + post-processing:


Here's one of the original jpegs used straight out of the camera: