Is HDR ever a correct exposure

The other day, I had a conversation with a person on twitter in response to a twitter message that was "HDR photography = I don't want to care about getting the best exposure for the scene". I had made the post because after having finished reading the book Understanding Exposure: How to Shoot Great Photographs with a Film or Digital Camera I could not see a reason for most images that were done in HDR on flick to have been. The only reason I could come up with was because the photographer either was too lazy to determine, just didn't care, or didn't know how to achieve the desired exposure for the scene. This twitter user (we will call him Mr. X) responded to my original post with "or HDR = I want all areas of my scene to be properly exposed."

Now, I thought about this for a bit and wondered. Why would an artist want everything in the scene to be completely exposed? You lose so much contrast and pop of an image when you do this. There are no real dark area (negative space) and too much lit area (positive space) for a good photograph. To me, this tends to make the final image flat.

Mr. X continued to try and support the need for HDR by the standard "Well, sometimes you can not properly expose a scene in one shot." Now, what a minute. Your eye can not expose some scenes completely either, so why should a camera? The brain combines multiple exposure of a scene, yes. But really, the brain is no where near capable of doing what HDR is, so what is HDR attempting to do? Photography has always been the attempt to capture a moment as one remembers seeing it through their eyes. Is HDR achieving this results, or is technology attempting to create things that we didn't realize when we see the scene?

All in all, I guess the best way that I can describe how I feel about HDR is by putting it in the following way. To me, HDR is like taking a multiple choice bubble test in which you don't really know what the correct answer is, so instead of making a choice, you decide to fill in every bubble. Now, are you answering the question correctly or not. I mean you have filled in the answer that is correct, but you have also filled in the answers that are incorrect. The same is with HDR. Somewhere in the HDR you have correctly exposed the scene, but mixed with that correct exposure is several incorrect ones. What do you think is the correct answer: HDR or one exposure that best fits the scene?