I agree with you (as usual, I agree with 90% of what you say) and encouragement schemes do obviously encourage spam but if it was the quality not the quantity that mattered then I think the system would be much better and I am obsessed with trophies. From where I am sitting right now I can see most of my personal collection of 50+ basketball trophies, championships, MVPs etc so naturally I would like my online team to have some trophies too.
Off topic: Pennants suck! I eventually threw out all of my pennants but one.