Preface: I've played this game quite a bit and "completed" the main story twice. I also really enjoy this game and just feel there are some things that drag it down significantly.

As the title says. Some things are unnecessarily grindy and to a degree, pointless.

Fishing as a whole feels tacked on just because other games in this genre have it. It serves almost no purpose and leveling it up does functionally nothing beneficial for you. The foods you can make are not worth the time it takes to reel in the fish, larger fish don't provide more meat. Example: Why does a 0.4 shrimp provide the same amount of meat as a 4.6 catfish? Leveling from 1 to 2 requires something like 50 fish, but from 2 to 3 seems to be multiple hundreds of fish, 200~300 maybe I lost count. This is absurd, especially since there is no tangible benefit to it. The fact that time also continues to pass while fishing is silly and compounds the issue. I feel when you reel in a fish it should pass the game 10 or 20 minutes automatically as opposed to it sometimes taking an in game hour to catch a single fish because of the way it fights. The fact that fish can get stuck on the buoys marking the fishing areas is still a thing since launch and just makes fishing take that much longer. The animation lock at the end of fishing is also too long, there is no reason for the 3 seconds of standing still before being able to do any input after reeling in a fish.

My suggestions for fishing would be to reduce the grind to level up from 2 to 3 to maybe 100 fish from the level 2 pond. That way people would have to engage in the harder fishing to level up but it'd be less fish over all. Increase the amount of meat the player receives from larger fish. See example above about shrimp and catfish as to why this feels absurd.

Early on, getting a few hundred stone and wood to upgrade anything is way too much. By the end of the game unlocking the barrens feels pretty quick in comparison even though it requires thousands of wood and stone, post barrens anything that requires less than 2k resources takes between 1~2 days to get. The issue here is a balance issue. It feels great by the end to just get everything quickly but early on it's such a pain point I've seen people drop or refund the game because of it. It feels bad.

My solution would be to increase early game wood and stone generation or reduce the requirements to upgrade the first layer of tools and unlocking the first new area.

Monster and sap drops need to be guaranteed. There is literally no reason other than for the sake of padding that something doesn't drop every time we kill monsters or at least one sap doesn't drop when we cut down a tree.

My solution, just let everything have a 100% drop chance.

Growbox is a great addition, and I love it, but having it take as long as it does for everything to grow, even early stuff, feels off. I get that we get 4 items per box but being limited to 3 boxes and the fact that it takes 2~5 days for anything to grow just feels too slow.

My solution, 1~3 days to grow depending on growth cycle if we were to keep the 3 boxes. If we were allowed to plant 5+ plants then the 2~5 days would be fine.

Cooking is almost worthless. Yes, some of the stuff you can cook is really good. But it takes so much to make any worthwhile food. You can buy a meal from Yorn for 50g and it's almost as good as the Salad recipe you get from Zeke that requires multiple glacial ingredients including stuff your dog has to dig up. The time, stamina, money and effort put into gathering ingredients to cook with far outweighs the benefits of just ignoring cooking altogether and buying some food from Yorn.

My solution: Make food worth it stamina-wise and reduce the ingredients required. The salad I used as an example should, for the ingredients required, fully restore stamina a balancing act could be to remove or reduce the amount of health it restores. We're chemists in a potion making game, I'd be fine with us making a potion or balm for us to heal ourselves and food being strictly for stamina restoration.

The dog is a pain in the ass. I love animals, dogs included, but the fact that we don't have a way to automatically feed the dog every morning is a pain. He gets hungry and shaky if we forget and the then constantly reminds us, every second, with an animation that we can't turn off. It also feels as though the benefit of the dog is outweighed by the fact we have to feed it. There are some items that only the dog can dig up but... why? Is it just to give it a purpose other than tracking NPCs that should be tracked on the map as is? Why can't I buy ginger from the rangers station? They surely know where and how to dig it up and do shovels not exist in this game's universe?

My solution: Give us a dog bowl we can fill with a week's worth of food. At least then the dog is a "set and forget" mechanic. Make us buy it as an upgrade for all I care, the dog just doesn't feel fun to play around with all the animations being tedious and taking too long.

I have other issues with the game, but this topic was just about the grind as I feel that is the single worst part of the game and desperately needs to be adressed. This game doesn't need the padding. The story is a little short but is overall fine and even without the grind takes a good few hours if you aren't speed running it. The villagers have nice stories that I can see people getting invested into and the stories themselves, surprisingly, don't take long to unlock as you can max out friendship with just some talking and moon cloves in a matter of in game days. Relationships are the one thing in this game that isn't a grind surprisingly. This is one of those games people could beat the main story for, and if the grind wasn't as bad, get lost in for extra time.