I've got to agree with Skyway here. If you look at leveling in most traditional RPGs (especially those based on strong rulesets), the goal of leveling is to build your character(s) up so that it/they can take on tougher challenges, enemies, and also gain new abilities to play the game in different ways. Even something as simple as gaining access to, say, an invisibility spell could radically change the way you go through a game, and if a game acknowledges that sort of ingenuity, all the better.
These days, however, most RPGs have leveling for the sake of leveling itself. Modern RPGs tend to just throw levels at the player every ten minutes, with XP counters and numbers constantly going up. I'm all for progression, but when the gains of levels are so small, the impact of skills so tiny, and when so little effort is required to get that ding, you really de-value what should be a fairly rare and significant event.
Even New Vegas, one of the better modern RPGs of the last few years, still has a major problem with certain skills having almost no real impact on gameplay - and if you didn't gain lots of XP from doing quests, and hunted around for the right items, you'd be able to easily finish the game at level 1 due to all the scaling and whatnot.
Sure, there's always been that "yeah, I leveled up!" feeling, but it's been reduced to this weird Pavlovian thing where it seems like the sole purpose of playing the game is to level up. Building your character should feel meaningful within the context of the game and due to the new options it provides you, not because you've moved the counter from 43 to 44.
