That's a reasonable question, and I think the strong reaction stems from two things.
First, the question seems designed to discover either personal attributes that are irrelevant to work or contractual preferences that can be used to hardball you during negotiations. Something like the Joel test is relevant to the questions you mention above. But the OP doesn't seem interested in Joel-test like answers, he says he wants something deeper and more revealing.
Secondly, virtually everyone is going to answer questions like this with trying to guess what the interviewer wants to hear. So it becomes a stupid waste-of-time mind game. As someone mentioned below, it's a lot like the "what are your weaknesses" question.
The biggest danger in interviewing is the tendency to hire clones of oneself. Questions like this are a huge contributor to that. It would be easy to re-word this question to make it more work-related and fit the kind of thing you're talking about, but the OP doesn't seem interested in that.
This kind of interview question really pisses me off. It's basically an attempt at amateur psychologizing in the interview process, and since the questioner is generally completely unqualified to seriously analyze the answer, the reaction generally has nothing to do with "corporate culture" but everything to do with the prejudices and preferences of the interviewer. Sometimes those prejudices are trivial ("oh, he cares about external noise and so do I") but often they are windows through which more serious cultural and gender prejudices sneak in.
I mean, so if the interviewee says that healthcare is incredibly important because they have a sick child, that doesn't tell you anything at all about how well they'll do at the job (but hiring managers often have strong feelings one way or another about the importance of family). And so what if you manage to trick them into saying they felt unappreciated at their last job: you have no idea what the last job was really like, what information could you possibly gain?
It's true that questions like this can be very revealing. They seldom review anything relevant about the interviewee, but they do reveal that the hiring manager is an incompetent jerk.
First, the question seems designed to discover either personal attributes that are irrelevant to work or contractual preferences that can be used to hardball you during negotiations. Something like the Joel test is relevant to the questions you mention above. But the OP doesn't seem interested in Joel-test like answers, he says he wants something deeper and more revealing.
Secondly, virtually everyone is going to answer questions like this with trying to guess what the interviewer wants to hear. So it becomes a stupid waste-of-time mind game. As someone mentioned below, it's a lot like the "what are your weaknesses" question.
The biggest danger in interviewing is the tendency to hire clones of oneself. Questions like this are a huge contributor to that. It would be easy to re-word this question to make it more work-related and fit the kind of thing you're talking about, but the OP doesn't seem interested in that.