grind is a function in rpgs and is acceptable in that role when and only when those games include activities that are beyond grind loops to acquire the same and better rewards in far less time but with much more skill and risk involved.
Elite dangerous doesn't have such higher level game loops. You have grind loops, and then you have the same exact grind loops but done at the behest of a mission giver, with the difference in skill and risk being so small that often there is none and the difference in reward being frequently nil.
Sure, you have the option in elite dangerous of not burning yourself out by repeating the same activities as fast as possible, but this doesn't eliminate the fact that it's all grind loops. All the exact same activity. With the exception of combat ...which has some small amount of risk and skill scale (but not nearly enough). It's missing the more complicated gameplay loops that leverage the skill you've built up in your initial grinding stage that allow players who have really mastered those game mechanics to acquire significantly higher / better rewards in far less time but at a significant risk of meaningful loss.
But i'd go further than simply critique the lack of any game loops above grind and suggest that the grind loops themselves are unremarkable. They dont live up to the achievement of the Stellar Forge. They're almost exactly the same game loops that existed in the game decades ago with basically aesthetic updates. There's really no attempt to make these game loops interesting or novel. There's no progression or evolution of the game mechanics involved, just stagnation - copies of what was designed before.
Elite dangerous is a playable game with few if any real alternatives competing in the same exact genre and there is nothing really so annoying that you'd rage quit it or not find something to waste some time doing in it. But it's a game that lets down the technical achievement that apparently all of the effort and imagination and innovation went into, the Stellar Forge, by strapping copy and pasted game mechanics that are 30 years old. It'll be another elite game noted for it's technical achievement rather than it's gameplay - and that's regrettable because there's so much existing game content out there to get inspiration from compared to elite 1984.
Excellent post. Its all about design philosophy and the studios priorities - or understanding of how to make qualitative content.
Engineers are grind loop crafting system. You spend hours gathering materials which requires patience, and then dump them on an engineer. The design philosophy only cares about how much time it takes to gather materials.
The idea that "its a crafting system, so harvesting grind is a natural consequence of that" is unimaginitive.
I recently got around to playing one of those Atelier JRPG's - the two Atelier Ryza games. They're alchemy themed RPG's built around gathering and crafting as its core mechanic.
You basically craft everything in those games.
You gather materials, craft raw into refined materials, craft to create equipment, craft to create supplies, and craft to upgrade equipment.
The thing that stuck out to me was that I was expecting a grind heavy game, but it wasn't. The game throws materials at you like candies. It places its emphasis on the crafting system itself. They'd spent the time to create a deep, highly flexible crafting system that wants you to experiment with materials and see what happens.
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