I feel like half of the 'good' pictures I see are overedited to shit like picrel - all subtelty is taken out of the images and we're left with in-your-face shots of very non in-your-face subject matter. It feels like in an effort to make photos more 'real', they have become more and more artificial.

Has this always been the case, or at least always been the case within digital photography? Is my taste just shit and it's all actually great? Should I just be turning the contrast slider all the way up on all my photos?