"Some of the HM's could be combined, like surf & waterfall, fly & defog, rock smash & strength (it takes strength to be able to smash rocks, duh.)"
That struck me as humorous.
I, too, am annoyed at the ever-growing amount of HMs in the Pokemon games. I was perfectly content with the original six, although I wasn't the biggest fan of Rock Smash. When they introduced Whirlpool and Dive I went with it. Then they had like two or three new HMs and I felt like I was in a complete overload.
There are three things that bother me about the HMs. The nitpickiest reason is that they took Flash out. It helped me SO much when I was in caves, and I really like accuracy-lowering moves so I never considered it a waste to teach it to my Pokemon. Also, in GSC, I liked the action of temporarily blinding the screen when you used it....heh.
The second reason is that your Pokemon cannot forget HMs unless you go to the Move Deleter. When my Pokemon tries to learn a new move, I take the opportunity really seriously and I hate having a party member know more than one HM because then it has the option to forget only TWO moves. Two moves that could be particularly useful. I would hate to give up Crunch because there was no way I could make my Feraligatr forget WHIRLPOOL. :|
The third reason is, plain and simple, because there are so many and some of them seem absolutely useless! The original six HMs I liked because they, sans Fly, were necessary in completing the game. Flash, Surf, Fly, Cut, Strength and Rock Smash were all great moves and it's understandable they were HMs. The others...well, the ability go underwater was a cool one, but after that the HMs just annoyed me. Rock Climb? To reach an item that turned out not even to be that great? This thread has also shown me that it is not very useful in battle!
Sometimes I feel the company feels pressured to create new HMs each generation to add something cool and new to the game, and they make some sort of obstacle so you have to use it. This is why they have HM slaves. :| Torkoal is going to hate me more for this, but I did not have the patience to "man out" the foggy road so I was forced to use Defog. When I read the description for the move in battle, I, once again, went " :| ". I really did not like the sound of it at all and I couldn't bring myself to teach it to my Staravia. I went to the PC and had Hoothoot, who I never planned on using, learn it instead.
Overall, the HMs are a cool way to use moves to interact with the games, but I really think there are too many now. Combining some of them does seem like a good idea.
