Obstacles in roleplaying games do not exist in order to prevent a PC from doing something. They exist in order to challenge the players to come up with an interesting way of doing it.
(This thought occurred to me as I was reading Flawless by Scott Andrew Selby and Greg Campbell in which they describe a diamond heist in ’76 in which the thieves tunneled into the vault from the sewer. They tested for the presence of a seismic alarm using an alarm clock and hauled away the excavated dirt in a Landrover they drove through the sewer tunnels. Then they welded the vault door shut from the inside and threw a Bastille Day looting party. That vault door didn’t exist to protect the jewels. It existed to make those thieves look cool.)
What about the element of risk? It may not be necessary for an RPG in theory, but I think the risk=excitement “equation” does get factored into the obstacles that we see in RPGs.
In principle, however, I would like to agree with you. I believe that a good obstacle does exactly what you describe. I suspect that this viewpoint is… less than common.
I’d argue that risk is one way of making the accomplishment interesting. It’s one form of obstacle. Although, as you say, it may too often be treated as an over-used default.
OTOH, I’m almost certainly over-generalizing. Failure can be interesting. (Although often failure is merely another momentary obstacle between you and the goal — it’s something else that has to be overcome.)
On the gripping hand, however, it’s probably not necessary to design for failure. Like red herrings in mysteries, players will tend to provide their own failures when faced with obstacles — even if you designed those obstacles with the intention that they would be overcome.
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