Who else remembers when Photoshop barely had any features?

When I first used Photoshop back in the early 90's, all we used it for was cleaning up logos from a 300dpi bitmap scanner on an 8bit MacII CX. Obviously equipment got better, the features improved, skills developed and once layers were added in version 3 a whole new world seemed to open up. Nowadays everyone is aware of Photoshop, to the point of it becoming a verb, and it is used in some way on the majority of pictures. The features have grown to a point where in the right hands you can pretty much do anything with any image, or so people think, but my question is should we?

That's probably a ridiculous question from someone that has worked as a retoucher for the past 20 plus years and don't get me wrong, I love the challenge of a really tricky retouching job, but the obsession with Photoshop has in some ways ruined photography. Once upon a time besides the general cleaning up you might have a handful of good shots to comp for a finished piece. Now you get handed a drive with literally thousands of raw files for you to pick the best 12 to create one colossal layered file. Not only does this undermine the talents of the photographer but you end up with an image with no discernable light source, that looks more like an illustration. Worse still, once the client gets their hands on them and zooms in to 400% to check them on their non calibrated monitor you end up with wave after wave of changes that would never be seen in print and definitely not be noticed on a web page. Single pixels spotted out... Having to match colour swatches so the the product now looks completely out of place with the ambient light source... Skin smoothed to look like plastic... Images massively over sharpened for that 'High Def' feel... Or more often than not just bad 'suggestions' that get done because 'they are the client'.

I'm rambling now (it's probably my age) but wouldn't it be nice to use retouching to improve an image again rather than working them to death?