Pertaining to HGE's. Prior to the FSS addition to the game. It got bad enough that you could only find one if you were lucky once an hour. The problem here being that if you are designing a game that is so tedious and boring that to accomplish a task you need to pull up Netflix to be entertained. The design of the game is bad. Games are by their nature supposed to be entertaining and fun. Not boring, tedium.
Whether you see it as a grind or not is not relevant. Because what you enjoy as a task, may not be fun for someone else. If you don't think it is a grind. That is perfectly good for you. But that does not mean your point of reference is shared or even equal to someone else's point of reference. It isn't a bad thing. That is what makes life interesting.
Break it down into a different way of thinking instead. If it takes 10 hours of continuous play time to work through a goal. Whether you decide to break that up across months so as not to notice it. Or choose to work on it at a targeted approach. That does not shorten the length of time spent to achieve goal X. It is still a grind because in both outcomes either way the same amount of work and time and effort had to go in. But on one side you were not invested to get to the other side of the goal efficiently. Where as the other focused on the goal to get it accomplished as soon as possible. The approach just does not change the work needed. The very fact you felt the need to bury something with in other tasks so as to notice it less. Is also a sign that it wasn't a fun, enjoyable, and entertaining thing to do. You avoided it to do other content that was fun. Thus, it was a grind.
The one thing many of us can agree on. Frontier with Elite Dangerous there is room for potential. The problem is their leadership is not listening to their customers. Their developers do not actually "Play the Game" the way their customers "Play the Game". Frontier's Leadership share in the same failure. Not one of them has the balls to sit down and do a live stream to prove they can, and have played, and enjoys their tedious game play. Not one of them right now would go mining for LTD's with their "Supposed" fix that broke mining. Not one of them has the heart to actually admit they are not allowed to spend the time they would need to in order to test the game the same way their player base plays the game. Because they have designed the game to take hours to accomplish something. They just won't get a sign off to be payed to actually "Play the game" they have designed. They certainly don't go home on the weekend to spend their free time in a game they are required to work on. Work does not beget entertainment. I sure wouldn't want to stick my head into Elite after working on its code for features that are not in the game yet, or trying to identify a bug in that same code.
As it is, with their current patch and their bugs. I have zero interest to play Elite myself. It isn't worth my time. It is just bad programming, bad bugs, and unrewarding game play.