I mean, I doubt they're going for photo realism. On the whole Destiny is a highly stylized game and its built that way intentionally.

Why utilize overblowing, blinding, lighting effects?
I don't feel that it draws me in or enhances the realism, just the opposite, I feel like it pushes me away.
HDR ≠ realism

Actually, most of the stuff HDR is used for is somewhat justifiable from the standpoint of realism. Your TV can't represent a very wide range of brightnesses compared to the real world, which makes high-contrast scenes in video games unrealistic to begin with.

For instance, in the real world, your vision is weakly convolved with a roughly gaussian-shaped filter. This means that extremely bright objects in view will have a slight "halo" of light around them. Video games can't represent extremely bright objects at their actual luminances on your TV, so without any use of HDR, you won't experience this realistic effect when playing games. Hence the (admittedly usually quite exaggerated) use of bloom. Is having bloom alongside a non-quite-realistically-bright object more realistic/effective than just letting that object not be very bright? That's debatable. At the very least, it seems to be the case that using that sort of visual cue can make things appear brighter.

Similar arguments can be made for other effects, like the light acclimation that can occur in some games when transitioning between bright areas and dark areas. Actually, this particular effect is sort of required for functional gameplay in environments that want to utilize a broad range of brightnesses.

Why go through the trouble of building stunning, detailed, graphics if you are just going to make them "less pleasing" to the eye with overly emphasized effects that cause massive blurring. Why utilize overblowing, blinding, lighting effects?

Because when done right it looks really awesome in motion. Go play Crysis 2 on Ultra with all the effects and motion blur turned on. It's like 0_o

Bleh, not my favorite effect. That dude looks great in motion though,

I was thinking the same thing. On the initial shots where it was outdoors it looked good, but in low-light conditions it seems over-exaggerated and unrealistic. I'm not even sure that a real chromatic aberration would be that visible in low-light. Certainly the scale of the colour phasing seems excessive here:

The little flecks of light aren't just showing aberration — they're completely separating out into the three colour channels, creating three flecks from one. Same with the vertical lines. I have to imagine when it's running at whatever resolution it runs at natively, without any supersampling, this effect isn't going to be so extreme, but right here it looks like it needs toning down a bit.

You don't know:

1. What kind of space magic warps light like that.
2. How it looks in motion.

Video games are meant to be seen moving. If you get your hands on the beta or HD videos and it looks bad, then complain :-p

It's also funny how you call chromatic aberration in low light unrealistic, when it's an artifact of glass lenses, which is unrealistic anyway since our eyes aren't made of glass. Video games have no 'camera' so they can do whatever they want.