I don't mind the grind at all. What grinds my gears though is the RNG.I'm not exactly sure why engineering needs to be made easier. If it's made purely easier, without any balancing drawbacks, then it would be, once again, just pure power creep.
Well, I suppose a ton of people complain about the engineering for some reason. I never quite understood the reasoning, as it just sounds like "I need to grind the game in order to get the highest-grade endgame stuff". Something that's quite common in MMOs. What exactly are they expecting? Getting all the highest-grade stuff from the get-go without any kind of effort? Make ED into CS:GO? Just make it an outright arena shooter in space?
News flash: Some of us don't mind the need for grinding. It gives that sense of getting a reward for your effort. You aren't given everything for free, but you have to actually earn it by doing some work. It doesn't feel even close as rewarding if you don't need to put any effort into it. Some of us don't play this game as just a glorified version of ED:Arena.
I'm currently engineering SCO drives for my whole fleet.
Raw materials: Fine, there's places you can grind them at industrial productivity level. There's still some RNG, but the sheer volume you can rake in makes up for that. It took me day to fill all G4 materials to at least the desired levels to be able to trade down and didn't even have to for most lesser materials, since they were pulled in in volume as a byproduct as well.
Data materials: Mixed bag. For low volume engineering you can grind Jameson's Cobra and trade down/across. For a large volume project like mine currently that isn't an option. I need so many Datamined Wake Exceptions, that the crosstrade ratio of 6:1 is way too punishing. And the RNG in wake scanning is considerable. It works, eventually, but it takes a lot of time.
Manufactured Materials: Living Hell. I need absurd amounts of Chemical Manipulators, so I need to farm Pharmaceutical Isolators to trade down. Enter the insane RNG of High Grade Emissions farming. Not only is the presence of faction states neccessary for a certain material to spawn widely different (Outbreaks for Pharma Isos are rare, Imperial systems for Imperial shielding are as many as sand on a beach for example), but also the HGE mechanic itself is absolutely punishing. The spawn rate is way too low, it runs on a timer and is often far far away, which only recently got a little less relevant thanks to the brand new SCO drives. On top of that HGE despawn after you collect from them once, if you play as intended. And then you can wait endlessly for the next. The only thing making HGE farming borderline tolerable is relog-spamming. If/when you eventually get a rare HGE type that's on a 30+ minute timer still, you are set and can fill that material up to max in one go. Going through that ordeal still feels terrible.