Impressive Dynamic Colors (Superficial/Artificial) vs Washed Out Faded Colors (Originality/Natural)

A  photograph will never appear anything like what you saw with the naked eye.  Trying to make your photographs appear just like what you saw is an exercise in futility and you will never achieve your full potential as a photographer until you abandon this notion.  
Photographs are flat, our vision renders a dimensional scene.  Photographs have specific and well defined boundaries, our vision does not.  Our eyes focus and refocus several times per second, a photograph has a single plane of focus.  Photographs are often small, the landscapes contained therein are often enormous....and so on...
In addition, the image that we see in our minds are affected by all of our senses, our smell, the temperature, even our moods.
Therefore, it makes much more sense to process are photographs in such a manner as to attempt to evoke an emotional response from the viewer that may only approximate how we may have envisionrd the scene. Or not it all, depending on what we truly wish to communicate.
As an example I will present three images.  The first image, was pushed reasonably hard in post.  The grandeur of the scene, the stillness of the water, it crystal clear air, the symmetry of the mirror reflection and the deep cobalt blue sky were all very important elements to me in this image.  It took fairly aggressive post processing to bring this image within a fraction of the grandeur I was experiencing before me.

There was obviously color in this image when I took it, but to me it communicates better and black and white.  The desolate starkness of the environment seems to be an important element of the image.  The ground was much more level and my camera ended up tilted.  I chose not to level the image in order to reinforce the amateurish, snapshot look to it.  Which, as it happens, is really how I felt when I was taking the picture.  Finally, no attempt has been made to reduce the digital noise but definitely was not visible to the naked eye.

This final image, has received next to no Post Processing.  In fact, if I recalled, I actually lowered the saturation a tad. I believe, that at the time,  that the alpenglow was actually much more intense.  As it turns out, any attempt to push the colors results in an image that is more beyond belief that what you see here.  I had climbed the glacial moraine at a breakneck pace in the dark in hopes of capturing the morning's splendor.  The light was so vivid and intense, that it actually brought tears to the eyes of a young girl that was sharing my vantage.  Her boyfriend gave her a hug and and asked if she was OK.  She sniffed  back the tears, and opined, "It's, it's just the most amazing thing I have ever seen." I entertain no illusions, that this image will bring someone to tears, or for that matter, to ever be described as the most amazing thing that someone is ever saw.

--
There is simply too much beauty in the world to photograph it all, but I'm trying.