Just playing through the OK-but-grossly-overrated Batman Arkham City, and I truly pity the poor cunts who were dumb enough to do the absolute plethora of mundane tasks in hand here.
It's also really highlighting one of the main issues with achievements and such filler tasks, that being how little use they are in-game, and how little connectivity they usually have with actually playing the game.
If I want to 1CC or no-death run Hellfire, all the skills which the game teaches me in it's earlier levels need to be honed and mastered for it's later ones. Contrast that to B:AC, and here I'm learning all this fancy bullshit...such as taking enemies down with slides, cloths-lining them mid-fight via a Bat-Grapple, electro-stunning them etc....and absolutely none of it's required to progress, you can just button-bash, dodge and counter against most enemies for melee. Heck, you're usually better off using the simpler approach, trying to squeeze in all the fancier stuff in is just what gets you killed.
Now some may say "but that's the challenge...the challenge is to add that fancy stuff in, and thus get a higher score....", but even though that's true it's still fucking bollocks game design. Because the primary goal should always be to survive and conquer, it's what our instincts are built on, so challenges should be built around that first and foremost, not style. If they wanted to add challenge, the rewards should have been to take down as many gangs as possible without dying, not with the most gadget use.
And the amount of tasks in this game is just stupid anyway. 400 fucking Riddler tasks to sort....for experience points in a game which you can just button-bash, dodge and counter through anyway....fuck that.
Honestly, some of the most stupid, contradictory design going. Arkham Asylum got the balance FAR better, the extras there served as a distraction like salad does with a steak. Here they bury the steak under a fucking garden.