The problem isn't so much the actual grind, more the myopic singular vision players approach it with...
For example people grind for credits, then complain the game is "sssoooo grindy" because they have been shooting the same rock straight straight for four days in a row, yet there is a whole fircking galaxy of opportunities:
...all of which pay something... albeit some significantly more than others. So why not mix it up a bit, blast asteroids for a bit, on the second mining run cash in the cargo, switch into something leggy or fighty, go on a "kylie tour" (1,000 Light Year = one K L Y = Kylie which is a shortish ranged exploration trip that takes a couple of hours) take in some sights, bank ten, twenty million in exploration data. Go meta on that and take some famous "explorer" to a beacon beside something worth seeing, or just go shoot ships in a CZ or one of the three flavours of RES. You'd still be banking tens of millions towards your carrier, just not as quickly as the guy who eggsploited to the max in the name of grindominous, and you'd also pick up new skills or at least hone existing ones and or see new sights along the way.
But no, players insist on pursuing min/maxing by headbutting the grind wall, and complaining about bad game design because of the grind.
This is not a holier than thou sermon, when I was a noob, in 2.0 era, where activities paid around an order of magnitude less than they do today on average, I was hell bent on getting combat clipper, I did my credit "grind" as mixture of ground assault missions, long range smuggling, bounty hunting. Later on when I made duke, some wingmates jedi mind tricked me to get fed rank as the corvette was the only ship with twin Class 4 "Huge" hardpoints, so I did. But for all I quickly got the rank, I didn't get have the credits for the ships, so, for a while I ended up sharing a most of the internals between my "big 3" ships. Even then I didn't grind the nuts off any given activity for the credits, over the course of any given week I'd do multiple things, like go trading in the cutter for a couple of days, park the cutter, sell the big core internals, load an iEagle or DBS and go zap some ground-targets, load the conda and by it it's big internals and go bounty hunting, sell those internals, load the clipper go combat patrol "undermining", load the vette, buy internals, go smash a CZ to oblivion, load an ASP and go to Robigo and do a couple of long range smuggling sortees. Doing this wide gamut of money making activities meant that gradually I built the big three in my collection, without sickening myself to any one activity, as it still felt like I was playing a game not stamping in shifts at a credits factory...
Same for ranks, imp rank came organically for my valiant efforts pro gloria imperii, accelerated by some targetted mission running in hotspots. So for example I hit up disney princesses territory as I heard that prismatic imperium had a large territory and a lot of varied mission types, so I'd go out in a conda missile cruiser with dumbfire missiles and a couple of SRV hangars on it, pew pew some fed bases and scan data terminals, pick up medical supplies on my way back and sell the medical supplies to mission givers. After a couple of laps of that circuit I had a little imperial system up my sleeve that aye handed out ground assault missions for a neighbouring system, do a mission baord full of them in an iEagle, then off to Gende do some bountyhunting there out to chujohimba/pancienses for some bulk "ABBA" trading (A--> B + B -->A trading with a backload, buy stuff at A to sell for proffit to B and buy stuff at B to sell at A) - to buff the credit balance and also slowly improve the rep. FED rank was a day in 17 Draconis with a chequebook, followed by a bit of time out in Exphiay's little mini fed bubble. I even roleplayed this a little, my time in Exphiay was a POW sentence to federal hard labour for my actions against the federation in Imperial service.
Pilots-Federation ranks? Combat Elite came as a result of my "military service", Trade Elite came later, but was RP'd as being an unintended consequence of my building my back story for undercover ops, exploration, I left my former powerplay focussed playergroup and used long range passenger missions to give me far out known pretty things to go fly towards, and RP'd this as a gap year.
Now, go and roleplay eggsploiting...
