Firstly, I'm going to tell you that your view on post-processing is a bit off. Fancy-pants post-processing, using skill and tools to lift more out of the negative than you'd ever think possible, has been around for ever; just read Adam's Examples to see how he farted about in the darkroom for ages to get things printed just so, all because his negative was a bit shit. Hell, Lightroom's called Lightroom for a reason :)

There is nothing wrong or unskilled in taking a RAW image and using a tool like Lightroom to adjust curves, apply geometry adjustments, remove chromatic aberrations, or achieve a particular ambience. Using the sliders to lift shadows is no different to waving a piece of card around (when developing wet film) to dodge and burn (again, those tools have those names for a reason).

Consider it a part of the evolution of photography. There's little conceptual distance between your view of post-processing and a pinhole camera photographer's disdain for those cheaters who use actual lenses the charlatans!

Of course, these things exist on a continuum and it's certainly true that there are people who use those tools not to make great pictures that take the viewer on a journey or tell a story or whatever, but to steal other peoples' work, to artificially elevate the mediocre, to disguise a lack of technical or compositional skill, and so on. But it doesn't matter. Great pictures always look like great pictures.

HDR is a funny thing. I have a rule of thumb; if it's got "HDR" in the title, it's almost certainly shit; if I can tell it's HDR, it definitely is shit. However, there are lots of very good HDR photos out there, and you've probably liked some of them, where you simply cannot tell that HDR has been used to manage the exposure.

...a nice view doesn't automatically mean a good photograph.