I guess you've never played any MMOs then? The effort to increase your character's level tends to increase exponentially, so that MMOs quickly become a 'grind'. (Doesn't seem to stop most people playing them though.)
By your logic MMOs are shooting themselves in the foot. But the reality is that once players reach max level & with the best equipment (etc), so that there's nothing else to get, they tend to become bored & leave the game. So to keep people playing MMOs have to be grindy.
And so sadly the same has to be true for Elite Dangerous: If everyone had tons of credits (allowing them to buy the best ships), maximum Reputation & Rank, tons of rare materials, maximum Engineered stuff, etc, they'd likely get bored because there was nothing new to strive for. (Even PvPers would likely get bored eventually, as everyone would be using the exact same 'best' ship, as it would be within easy reach of everyone.)
The difficulty is finding a balance between 'too grindy' & 'not grindy enough'. MMOs tend to solve that by having an exponentially increasing difficulty (so that those who play a little & those who play a lot see the difficulty increase at the same rate, roughly speaking). With Elite it's not so easy to balance, as there is no 'character level' - instead credits plus exponentially expensive ship (e.g. Anaconda at the top end) have somewhat replaced that.
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) Maybe some of you feel the overall grind was reduced. I think all that was actually done was rob Peter to pay Paul. We need less mats/data to engineer now, but it takes a helluva lot more time to find everything necessary, to engineer up to G5. I never had to do thousands of rolls on 1 thing to get THE roll, because 30 rolls would get me something that was adequate. If you knew how to play odds or count cards, getting a God Roll against the engineering RNG, wasn't as difficult as everyone made it out to be. You're welcome to have your opinion. Your's won't likely change mine. 
