I'm on the fence too.
I do agree that account-wide badges might potentially de-value certain activities and that's a definite concern. At the same time, I sometimes feel restricted (perhaps just me though) to playing my main for badges instead of playing any character for badges.
I wonder if the right move here is to sort of borrow a page from how WoW does this - the majority of achievements in that game are account-wide, but some are not. I think the balance might be different for CoH, but the same idea might work. I'm honestly not sure which badges should be considered account-wide, but I know that if there were steps taken in this direction, I'd feel more free to play whatever characters I want (again, I'm not going to pretend that this is a feeling affecting the majority of the player base, but it definitely affects me).