Believe me. We've heard and listened to this feedback. Even without the hyperbole (5 minutes!?, come on man, we worked hard on this!), the fact that many players could achieve high status so quickly with so many different factions is a problem and one that in future titles we will address by:
The obvious: we'll put titles further back in the quest chain. Players often complain that quest givers send them to do "chores" even if the "chore" is a multi-tiered quest with multiple ways to complete it; however, this reduces if their character is the leader of a group and the NPCs suggest that they do things for the player's group, so we tried to get people in the Captain's seat as soon as possible. There are other ways to get across the idea of ownership and inclusion in a group that are more natural.
One of the biggest reasons some of the accolades seemed unearned is that players chose a difficulty setting that made the game far too easy for them. We can test hard and very-hard modes all we like in-house, but if players are not using them, they do nothing for us. We should have pushed players who are experts to play on Hard or Very Hard mode more. If I could go back, I'd have a pop-up that comes up after the tutorial battle in power-armor vs. the Deathclaw suggesting that they up the difficulty if they beat it without dying once and telling players that harder difficulties increase the spawn rate of legendary enemies and thus legendary loot. Additionally, I would make it so that if players die twice or more in that tutorial, the game should suggest that they lower the difficulty one-notch.
We maybe had too many factions. I think we could have melded the Railroad and the Minutemen together - maybe making the Railroad a secretive sub-division due to the fact that helping synths, while still a "good" alignment act is a separate mission from helping settlers. This would have made for more content for the one combined faction and would have thus made progression feel more earned later in the longer quest tree.