While having direct quantitative feedback regarding badge counters may have negative consequences to gameplay, having some "subjective" feedback would help with the "I could swear I've done 1003 herbs. Why don't I have my badge?"
So instead of a literal quantitative "You have 853/1003" or "85% complete", have messages that give subjective feedback on how close you are to a particular badge. The exact message you get is somewhat random, within a given % range
(Personally I image the quotes coming from Illmenski Jones, but that's just me)
0-20%: "You don't seem to be working on it very hard"
5-25%: "A start."
10-30%: "A nice start."
15-35%: "Look at you, badginess is surely in your future"
20-40%: "Wow, with some hard work, you could get somewhere"
...
98-100%: "OMG OMG OMG!!"
So if you were 12% through Bounder, Tenured you might get "A start" or "A nice start", but not "Look at you..."
[ For the programmers out there: Purely random would allow folks to just spam refresh, so I suggest a hash of the Ur date be used to pick which message is shown ]