Awards are not put to the primary place  and you are free not to pay attention to them or not pay. In the progress bar you can just see what they mean and that's it.  Some of us are more children in their soul, some are less. People are different.
In future we will add (hopefully) different kinds of verification of users and it will be shown in the awards part. In future the award showing if the person has no complaints on him/her will be active. Also some can take usefulness in seeing if the person is actively visiting the site or just an eventual visitor. An award showing if a person has high response level also can be implemented (in my opinion, it is better to answer "yes, thank you, but sorry, not interested" than just skip the letter if you are not interested. So we want to show and compliment such users). Anyway, a person is free to hide all his awards. It is up to him.