Can't wait for the Shadow of the Colossus HD remake's first round of DLC: "Time Savers" that make your horse gallop much faster, taking you right to the big fights. It's all empty plains between them anyway, right
This tweet occasioned by the divisive grind in Assassin's Creed: Odyssey? You can buy "Time Saver" options that speed it up, but which is the "actual game?" The slower, more laborious base-price version? Or the boosted version where you're powerful at a quicker pace?
You can't *really* believe those who insist a game with more grind is by definition worse, even if you also desire a quicker pace; it's clearly a matter of preference, since some people prefer a slower, drawn-out game with more procedural encounters.
So the game, its space-time map (shown: the equivalent from Spore), its balance of story and "free time," its variety of encounters, might be paced for a slower ramp-up, more wandering, more random fights. 
The other view claims that the presence of "Time Saver Items" in online stores suggests the default version of the game is deliberately hindered, like a Furby without all programming activated. It's interesting since the differences we're talking about are all balance numbers.
Here's my expert opinion: these Time Saver packs do not look as if they were designed... like, at all. They're not precision-tuned to be moneymakers like costing in profitable mobile games has to be; they're added as an afterthought to tick a box on a business plan checklist.
Look at these numbers, it's Extremely Phoned In. Not that it matters if you're like "AAAGH I hate grinding! I have to buy this, I don't have time." On the other hand: maybe that means you're bad at games that are designed to require patient repetition.
Stepping back a pace or two: the backdrop is all the ways that games are incentivized to be longer. "$ per hour" evaluations. Total Entertainment Experience. And of course, flashback: the entire "fantasy of labor" is built on grind. tinysubversions.com/2011/03/gdc-no…
An alternative would be a type of "accessibility mode" that lets you adjust grind instead of the kinds of difficulty options available in say, Celeste. Problematically, grind is so even less understood as a source of pleasure than "difficulty"-- a strong bias against it.
Personally, I advocate playing grindy games with "speed up" options as if you're playing against a house--as in gambling. The house wants you to fall into a cognitive trap (impatience) and lose your money, but you can resist it and keep your $.
